Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight (Wiley Psychology & Pop Culture)

by Langley, Travis

  Batman gets no Act V. His story in the comic books does not close. Numerous comics have presented variations of the character’s possible future but never his canonical end. In fact, even those unofficial future tales tend not to end with his death.18 Parallel universe stories that do depict deaths of other worlds’ Batmen often confirm that DC’s main Batman has followed the wiser path.19

  “The rest is silence.”

  —Hamlet, Hamlet, Act V, final scene

  “… here, in the endless cave, far past the burnt remains of a crimefighter whose time has passed…. It begins here—”

  —Batman’s narrative, The Dark Knight Returns, final page

  The Inner Child: Robin

  “He was about the same age I was when my parents died. His parents—circus acrobats—had been murdered. And I wanted to make a difference in his life. The way, if my parents had lived, they would have made a difference in mine.”

  —Batman, Batman #618 (2003)

  Whereas Sigmund Freud emphasized the importance of life’s earliest years and would have dwelled on the Waynes’ deaths, Carl Jung20 considered individuation (individual personality growth, integrating diverse aspects of oneself to form a whole and healthy identity) a lifelong process and would have cast his gaze wider across the entire course of Bruce Wayne’s life. Despite acknowledging that early experience influences us, Jung felt that psychological disturbances are more rooted in the present than in the past and that therapists should spend more time helping clients with the direction they’re taking into the future.21

  Both would have said that Robin the Boy Wonder reminds Batman of himself and the reason for his mission. Robin is a living symbol of the boy Bruce had been when he lost his parents and the boy he might have become under other circumstances. After all, Dick Grayson looks like young Bruce, his parents resemble Bruce’s, and both are about the same age when they witness their respective parents’ murders. Subsequent Boys Wonder Jason, Tim, and Damian all look like young Bruce, and Batman swiftly fires the only official Girl Wonder, blond Stephanie Brown.22 Through Robin, Batman receives vicarious wish fulfillment as he helps the boy get what young Bruce did not: guidance, crime-fighting as a father-and-son activity, justice, and thus closure. In their first case together, Batman and Robin send the Graysons’ killer to jail.

  Freud and Jung would have disagreed a bit on why Batman welcomes that symbol of his own childhood. Looking at how past crisis lingers with us via processes like fixation and repression, Freud might say that little boy Bruce, having never outgrown that night, always remains an important part of Batman’s fixated psyche. Jung, on the other hand, felt that past conflicts tend to influence us most when present difficulties bring them up again. Regression, another defense mechanism, involves seeking comfort by reverting to behavior from an earlier point in life, like the toilet-trained child who resumes bedwetting during her parents’ divorce or the ex-smoker who lights up while going bankrupt. Jung agreed that boys experience the Oedipus conflict, but he felt that it was unlikely to play an important role later unless the man reacted to current parental issues (e.g., Hamlet’s ire toward his mother for remarrying so soon) by regressing or emotionally returning to a conflict long since left behind.

  For Batman, Robin is not an unconscious symbol but rather a conscious reminder. In Robin’s debut,23 the narrative tells us, “The Batman thinks back to the time when his parents, too, were innocent victims of a criminal,” and he tells Dick, “My parents too were killed by a criminal. That’s why I’ve devoted my life to exterminate them.” By helping the boy get justice, Batman returns to his parents’ murder and gets to experience what a better post-murder outcome could have felt like.

  Jung would also examine Robin’s role as a symbol of the Child archetype and that child’s place in the hero’s journey.

  Jung’s Archetypes: Shadow of the Bat

  “Patients suffering delusional episodes often focus their paranoia on an external tormentor, usually one conforming to Jungian archetypes.”

  —Dr. Jonathan Crane, a.k.a. the Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy), Batman Begins (2008 motion picture)

  Carl Jung (1875–1961) mentioned Superman in his work, seeing Superman as the main personality and Clark Kent as Superman’s Shadow,24 but we can only speculate on how he’d have assessed Batman. Of particular importance is Jung’s theory that the collective unconscious, an inborn stratum of the psyche inherited by all humankind, prepares us to perceive and create themes that fit abstract, instinctive patterns called archetypes that organize the things we see and do.25 Certain themes and character types emerge in the legends and myths of every culture in the history of the world. Jung said the archetypal pattern is not “a question of inherited ideas, but of inherited possibilities of ideas.”26 The Joker is no more an inherent feature of every human psyche than is the mischievous Norse god Loki, but each has qualities common to rascally characters that stir trouble, challenge heroes, and push mortals on to greater heights in tales told throughout time. They are symbols of the Trickster archetype. Each fits within its mold, imperfectly sculpted with touches added and bits trimmed away by myriad storytellers over the course of many years.

  Jungian therapy involved helping the client both face reality and delve into the unconscious. In early treatment, the client encounters the principal features of the personal unconscious (the part of the unconscious gathered over a lifetime, not inherited): the Shadow and the Persona. The Shadow represents your dark side, not necessarily your evil side but the part of you that is hidden, out of the light, the sum of those characteristics you wish to conceal from both the world and yourself. We fear it. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a potion that Henry Jekyll hopes might eliminate evil releases a person’s darkest inclinations instead and lets his Shadow take control. Appropriately enough, given that Walter Gibson’s The Shadow helped inspire the Dark Knight’s creation,27 Batman is a Shadow character. Bruce Wayne confronts his own darkest nature early in life, chooses to work with it, and uses it to instill fear in others. His bright and dark sides work together to fight evil.

  Superheroes commonly have Shadow foes, enemies that are twisted counterparts to themselves: Flash, Reverse-Flash; Green Lantern, Sinestro the Yellow Lantern; brutal gamma-mutated Hulk, supersmart gamma-mutated Leader. These twists take many forms. Superman has both Bizarro, a dim-witted superstrong freak who does harm through his ignorance, and Lex Luthor, a non-superpowered scientist who does intentional evil for self-serving purposes—each a funhouse distortion from a different angle. Because Batman is himself a Shadow character, his Shadow foes become more freakish, more complicated than strong/dumb/amoral or mortal/smart/immoral. Inspired by a movie poster featuring Spencer Tracy’s Jekyll on half his face and his version of Hyde down the other, Two-Face mirrors the entire character, both Batman and Bruce Wayne at the same time but with both his sides furthering evil. By letting a coin toss absolve him of guilt and responsibility for his bad side’s actions, the villain’s unscarred “good” Harvey Dent side also serves wrongdoing.

  The Joker—laughing, murderous, psychopathic, brightly colored Clown Prince of Crime—shadows only Batman, not the whole character. The Joker has no alter ego. Despite some depictions, most notably when mobster Jack Napier becomes the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman, the comic book Joker has no secret identity, no confirmable past prior to the incident that turned him green-haired and chalk-white, and, for his first decade of publication, no origin at all.e “Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another,” he tells Batman in Alan Moore’s graphic novel The Killing Joke. “If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!” Because the Joker does not want Batman to have an alter ego, he threatens the lives of those who might expose the hero’s unmasked identity. He does not want to see Batman by daylight. He refuses to recognize any brighter facets of Batman’s Persona.

  The Persona is the mask, essentially a collection of masks that the ego wears when interacting with the outer world. You wear many masks. You bring
different set of qualities to different situations, and they all might be equally genuine. The face you wear on Saturday night may not be the face you wear on Sunday morning. The Persona helps keep the Shadow hidden. If balance between the two breaks down, a Persona-dominated person will worry too much what people think or a Shadow-dominated person might recognize no law beyond his own instant gratification.28 The Joker hates the nice, bright masks people wear. He strives to smash masks, trying to unleash people’s Shadow selves on the assumption that they’re all monstrous at heart.

  After the client faces those features of the personal unconscious, a Jungian therapist helps the person look at deeper aspects of the collective unconscious, beginning with the contrasexual archetypes, each gender’s innate sense of the opposite sex. Jung said every man carries an archetypal representation of woman, his Anima, and each woman carries one of man, her Animus. He said each gender has a sense of what it would mean for the two to join as soul mates, a divine couple in a relationship called the Syzygy, named for alignment of the planets. Batman’s attraction to Catwoman, established when he lets her escape in her first appearance even though he has “nice girl” Julie Madison in his life at the time, hints at his Anima’s nature. Because he thinks of Batman as his true self, he desires a woman more like his Shadow than his Persona, but because he is more than merely Shadow, he can never fully trust her or keep any woman continuously in his personal life. The Golden Age Batman and Catwoman had to retire from crime-fighting and crime respectively before they could balance their complex nature and spend most of their remaining years as a happy couple.29

  The maturing individual encounters representations of all the archetypes while progressing toward wholeness of being. The Self is the archetype of the individual’s greatest potential, where all aspects come together as one. The Hero story archetype reflects the individuating person making that trek from balancing Shadow and Persona to become, eventually, possibly, the Self.

  The Hero’s Journey

  Elaborating upon Jung’s writings on heroes, Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) referred to the Monomyth, the Hero’s Journey, as the archetypal myth at the foundation of every heroic tale.30 In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949),31 he described the steps heroes tend to take:

  departure, meaning the separation from their early lives (the Waynes get murdered, Bruce leaves Gotham);

  initiation, a series of trials that lead to achievement of the ultimate boon, the goal of that hero’s quest (Bruce trains under many teachers until ready to don cape and cowl);

  return, coming back to bestow his boon upon others (Batman comes to Gotham).

  Having gained wisdom, skills, and any other divine gifts, the hero returns to become a master of two worlds. Comics scholar Peter Coogan has observed that the entire journey takes place within the hero’s origin story: “The classical monomyth, identified by Joseph Campbell, clearly serves as a model for the origin stories of superheroes.”32

  Batman: Year One and Batman Begins offer glimpses into that journey, if only its first and final parts. Aside from their brief origin stories, the most prominent superheroes’ adventures rarely explore many steps within the monomythic arc—the television program Smallville a notable exception in its portrayal of young Clark Kent growing into his Superman role. Batman is a hero complete. As if to satisfy the inherent craving for tales of becoming heroes, the creators added a hero incomplete, a student for Batman to mentor, a Boy Wonder who will grow up.

  CASE FILE 9–1 Two-Face

  Real name: Harvey Dent

  First appearance: Detective Comics #66 (August 1942)

  Origin: Handsome District Attorney Harvey “Apollo” Dent fights to clean up corruption as “the Face” of honor and justice in Gotham City. Not above bending rules to advance that goal and frustrated by mobsters who bribe authorities so they can operate above the law, he becomes an early ally helping the bat-masked vigilante1 who “crosses a line we can’t.”2 After a crime boss scars the attorney’s face with acid, leaving his “face divided into beauty and ugliness,”3 Dent wants to hurt others. Relinquishing responsibility for his own actions, he begins making decisions based on the toss of a two-headed coin: clean side up, do good; scarred side up, do wrong.

  “The only morality in a cruel world is chance. Unbiased. Unprejudiced. Fair.”

  —Harvey Dent/Two-Face (Aaron Eckhart), The Dark Knight (2008 motion picture)

  If Dent now believes random chance controls people’s actions and fates, then he believes in external causality. Your locus of control is your generalized expectancy or set of beliefs regarding your ability to influence events.4 With internal locus, you tend to think your own skills and efforts determine the quality of your health, achievements, social interactions, and other life circumstances. With external locus, you attribute causality to things beyond your control, like weather, other people, predestination, or “blind, stupid, simple, doo-dah, clueless luck!”5 Successful people tend to make internal attributions, taking personal responsibility for completing tasks and reaching goals. Few people are 100% internal or 100% external. We often mix and match however makes us feel best. For example, regardless of our general tendencies, we nevertheless tend to make internal attributions about favorable outcomes (“I made an A”) and external attributions about unfavorable ones (“the professor gave me an F”). Harvey Dent, having climbed the career ladder to become district attorney and ambitiously determined to challenge all its corruption, appears to have had an internal locus before tragedy taught him that life is random and he should trust only fate.

  Maybe that experience changed his basic beliefs. On the other hand, he may be using that “lesson” as an excuse to lash out at the world. Now that he has begun to steal and kill, to exercise power over life and death, he might still believe in Harvey Dent even though he’d rather not. Because holding himself accountable for his transgressions disturbs Dent, Freud might say that the character asserts the reverse of his core belief as a defense mechanism. Reaction formation, outwardly transforming a belief or inclination into its opposite, helps him avoid judging himself by his own standards. In other words, Dent at heart still believes himself responsible for his actions, accountability he prefers not to think about, so he lets a coin toss excuse his actions. He generally does not care which evil things he does as long as he gets to do some. When he tries to force others to see the randomness of life, he is trying to convince himself.

  Although writers sometimes refer to Two-Face as having “multiple personalities,”6 depictions of him rarely meet any diagnostic criteria for what is now called dissociative identity disorder (DID; see Case Study 2–1: King Tut). With DID, good Harvey would take control for periods of time, and his bad side would take its turn, with at least one identity unable to recall things that happened when the other took over, but no, both sides consistently stay with him. Exceptions in the literature do appear. More than a year after plastic surgery repairs his face, a year when he fights crime rather than committing it, an overstressed Dent hears his dark side telling him to let it out to play until he scars himself deliberately to become Two-Face once more.7 While some DID patients report hearing their alter personalities, their other selves, that is not an essential feature for a DID diagnosis. The first story to present Harvey Dent and Two-Face as separate entities taking distinct turns controlling one body was “The Great Leap,” in which Harvey Dent asks Nightwing to protect a woman from a mob killer who later turns out to be Two-Face.8

  Could Two-Face’s dual nature have evolved into DID over time? That’s hard to say. After all these years, we barely understand multiple personality. Dissociative experience is so subjective that professionals cannot even agree on whether it exists. As mentioned when we looked at the Persona archetype, we all have variable personality states. If your Sunday morning self suppresses thoughts about your Saturday night self’s actions, there’s nothing to stop you from slapping a name on your Saturday side. I sometimes demonstrate this by asking a student volunteer question
s in front of a class. When I ask to speak to that student’s angry self, the person frowns, neck stiffens, and tone toughens up. When I request the student’s five-year-old self, the eyebrows lift, head bobs, and tone becomes childlike. Everyone does that—under no hypnosis and with no preparation. When I ask for the angry or child self’s real name, half the volunteers will offer a new name. Now imagine doing this in a therapeutic situation, especially while hypnotized. If Dent deals with Arkham Asylum therapists who believe he has DID, their therapeutic techniques may train him to emphasize division between his halves. When therapy causes or exacerbates mental illness, we refer to that process as iatrogenesis.9

  Harvey Dent seeks excuses. Attributing his misdoings to another self could absolve good Harvey even further than leaving decisions to his deliberate coin toss. After all these years, Harvey may be trying to convince himself he has multiple personality.

  Notes