Dick, in accepting Jason and then Tim, shows little sign of feeling dethroned. He has already relinquished the Robin role and moved into his adult life before the little brothers start showing up. When he, Bruce’s first adoptive son, becomes Batman in Bruce’s absence, though, he shows some signs of dethronement around Damian, allegedly Bruce’s first biological heir. Repeatedly calling the boy a “brat” to his face, Dick regresses a bit, acting less like a mature father figure and more like a teenage son who resents having to babysit a little stepbrother.
Psychosocial Stages
Batman as we know him skips the steps of growing up. He’s a child whose parents die and then he’s a crime-fighting hero, with scant attention to the years in between. While this suits Sigmund Freud’s view that personality takes shape early in childhood, psychodynamic contemplation of the lives of Batman’s sidekicks could benefit from Erik Erikson’s more elaborate stage theory. Freud said little about adolescence. Mentored by Sigmund’s daughter Anna Freud, who pioneered adolescent psychology as a distinct area of study, Erikson continued to call himself a loyal Freudian61 even as his ideas departed substantially from Freud’s psychoanalytic foundations. Sigmund Freud and Bruce Wayne, like other mentors and father figures throughout the ages, each watch their students take the lessons they’ve learned and build them into something new.
Instead of seeing sex drive as the impetus behind personality development, Erikson felt that interactions with our fellow human beings shape us more than anything else—hence his theory of psychosocial stages of development as opposed to Freud’s psychosexual stages. He also didn’t believe personality is mostly fixed by age six. The middle childhood and adolescent stages showed more active personality development than Freud had observed, and Erikson added adult stages as well. More optimistic than Freud, Erikson believed our personalities grow and change throughout our whole lives (see tables 10.1, 10.2, and 12.1).
TABLE 10.1. ERIKSON’s STAGES OF PSYCHOSOCIAL DEVELOPMENT PART 1: EARLY CHILDHOOD’BEFORE THE BAT-FAMILY MISSION
Before Bruce loses his parents and before any of the Robins meet him, they’ve each completed the earliest psychosocial stages and have developed important aspects of their respective personalities. Early in life, Bruce and Tim learn to trust their parents. Dick, who spends even more time with his parents, is more optimistic, hopeful, and trusting. Whereas newly orphaned Bruce is wary of adults who take an interest in him and his inheritance, Dick is immediately ready to trust police and a masked stranger who dresses like Dracula. Even though Stephanie and Jason have learned that people like their lovingc but criminal fathers will let them down, the mothers who’ve raised them demonstrated that reliable people do exist and people can make themselves overcome their own failings (as when Stephanie’s mother overcomes drug addiction), and so they both have hope, even if Jason’s takes a dangerous turn. Least trusting of them all is Damian, the one raised by servants and assassins, and yet even that cynical child still hopes others will prove themselves worthy. According to Erikson, they would have all developed these various and sometimes conflicting tendencies during the first year and a half of life, in the Trust vs. Mistrust stage, depending on how consistently their primary caregivers met the infants’ physical, emotional, and social needs.
A favorable outcome in one stage gives the individual abilities and characteristics that raise the odds of achieving favorable outcomes in subsequent stages as well. Toddlerhood carries the individual through the Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt stage, when the child learns to feel good and secure about doing things on his or her own (autonomously) or learns to feel unsure about acting independently, whether feeling shame (self-conscious about doing something bad) or doubt (uncertainty about one’s own ability to function independently). The struggle to develop autonomy can result in a weak will overburdened by shame, a strong but healthy will, or shameless willfulness as the insecure person tries too hard to assert independence. The extreme defiance individuals can show during adolescence grows from roots planted back during the “terrible twos.” The Batcave reeks of strong wills. Every Robin defies Batman at times, but usually within the range of healthy self-assertion because sometimes their grim mentor needs people to stand up to him. Insecure Jason’s unresolved grief over his parents leads him to become progressively defiant and distant, mistaking distance for autonomy, whereas a secure person can feel independent without cutting others off. Damian is willful all along, and yet bows in shame when Bruce chastises him, “You dishonor your sensei with your loss of composure!”62 Stephanie, despite carrying some self-doubt and constructing her original Spoiler identity to radiate her separateness from her father instead of ignoring him, possesses enough healthy autonomous qualities to help her mature into a young woman capable of operating independently and working with others, even Damian.63
In the Initiative vs. Guilt stage of the later preschool years, roughly ages three to six, the child develops a greater sense of purpose, learning to think ahead and undertake new tasks even if the child’s approach is not yet logical. Guilt, a new emotion, creeps in as the child becomes increasingly conscious of moral concerns. Bruce’s decision to become Batman shows great initiative, as does Stephanie’s to become Spoiler. Not satisfied with reading about Batman on the news after Jason dies, Tim Drake takes it upon himself to head for Wayne Manor and try to re-create a Dynamic Duo. Batman and all Robins show great initiative in taking on challenges, forming plans, and developing strategies. They all show hero initiative. While they also show varying capacities for guilt, they’ll let it inspire them instead of holding them back.
TABLE 10.2. ERIKSON’S STAGES OF PSYCHOSOCIAL DEVELOPMENT PART 2: LATER CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE’THE BOY/GIRL/TEEN WONDER YEARS
Dick and Damian first meet Batman when each boy is about the same age Bruce was when he lost his parents. Dick trains for months and Damian has two years of additional experiences before becoming Robin, but each is well within the Industry vs. Inferiority stage when he officially becomes Batman’s sidekick. During this time, interpersonal awareness, deductive reasoning, and ability to play by rules can flourish. Parents, instructors, and in this case mentors determine how well the children perceive their own growth. When Dick’s training begins, Bruce praises the boy’s acrobat skill, telling Dick, “You could probably teach me a thing or two!”64 The first time Bruce sees Damian perform as Robin, he assures this boy who so clearly aches for parental attention and approval, “You made the right choices. I’m proud of you.”65 Even Dick, however much Damian’s arrogance might annoy him, doles out positive reinforcement for his sidekick’s more astute deductions and better decisions.
Entering the caped crusade at such a young age, each has constructed his own sense of competence around his related interests, talents, and skills. Although he could later redefine himself during the identity crisis of adolescence, for him to do so entirely would mean abandoning the foundation for his personal sense of self-efficacy. A young Tiger Woods could have decided, “I’m going to give up this golf game I’m so good at,” but not easily.
Of the various Robins, fear of feeling inferior may exert its greatest influence on Damian, however superficially ironic that may seem. In Dick’s case, he’d had no previous Robin to whom he could compare himself. Damian is the first since Dick to become Robin this early in life. Damian’s often arrogant manner suggests that he has been taught that he’s supposed to feel superior without receiving guidance regarding the healthier aspects of self-esteem.
Jason, Tim, and Stephanie are all adolescents early in Erikson’s Identity Achievement vs. Role Confusion stage when they start fighting crime. Having already developed their overall sense of competence and industry, they are now trying to figure out who they are as individual human beings. During this time, the youth forms his or her self-image, integrating ideas about self and what others think of them, with expanding awareness of his or her place in the world. Shaping identity is difficult, complicated, and sometimes stressful beyond explanation. Tho
se who emerge from this stage form a strong sense of identity, though continuing to grow and add to that identity, and are better equipped to face adulthood with confidence and security. Dick and Tim, having enjoyed the most support and healthiest development all along the way, are the Robins who can most easily become stable adults. Peers play a critical role in shaping personality and helping adolescents define themselves. Aside from whatever high school experiences they live through in their civilian identities, Dick and Tim each enjoy the support of crime-fighting peers, the Teen Titans.
Dick (to Batman): Unlike the JLA, the Titans aren’t just about a promise to the world—it’s also about a promise to each other—to ourselves. We swore on our childhood nightmares that we’d be there for one another. If I don’t honor that, I don’t honor who I am.66
Individuals failing to achieve cohesive sense of self, those who continue to struggle with Erikson’s identity crisisd or who have given up on figuring themselves out, show great confusion over their roles in life. That would be Jason Todd. Dying keeps him from growing up. Time in a grave, in a coma, and then brain-damaged before the Lazarus Pit heals him mean he has missed out on his high school years. Physically he may be grown but emotionally he’s barely any older than he was when the Joker first killed him.
What Lies Ahead for the Robins?
Growing into two capable youths, each with a strong sense of self, Stephanie and Tim should have many of the qualities that would help them fare well if they ever get to enter the next psychosocial stage, Intimacy vs. Isolation, when those in their twenties and thirties either become increasingly capable of experiencing interpersonal intimacy with others or become psychologically isolated, cut off emotionally, and unable to open up. Aside from the sheer difficulty any superhero faces in achieving a balance between masked and civilian lives, the greatest impediment for Stephanie’s future intimacy may lie not in any problem with herself but in finding a compatible partner who can appreciate a strong and strong-willed woman. Many can. Plenty cannot. The major obstacle for Tim should be his own guilt and fear that his lifestyle might bring harm to his loved ones—again. Playing superhero already brought his father’s killer to the door.67 Jason Todd, who missed out on much of his own adolescence during his death, coma, and brain-damaged period, is far behind his peers in terms of personal growth. He has enjoyed the fewest opportunities to develop everyday social skills and seems unlikely to have any semblance of a “normal” relationship. Finding someone with the kind of patience he needs will not be easy. Most likely, he will enter into relationships with women as volatile as himself, and their relationships will seem as explosive as gasoline mating with fire.
Dick Grayson, the eldest Robin, has shown himself capable of long-term romantic relationships. Unfortunately for him, his lifestyle (plus the writers’ need to keep the stories lively) keeps getting in the way. As he’s about to marry longtime girlfriend Starfire, their minister gets murdered.68 Later he becomes engaged to Barbara Gordon but, again, superheroics interfere. Nevertheless, he remains more likely than Bruce to enter successful intimate relationships. Bruce’s personality is the first thing that interferes with his relationships. At least Dick Grayson goes for the “good girls.”
Dick: “Hold it. I’ve got one more thing to say. You and Alfred gave me a home and you gave me what we don’t mention. The L word. You were the best family I could have had. Thanks.”69
CASE FILE 10–1 Red Hood
Real name: Jason Peter Todd
First appearance: as Jason, Batman #357 (March, 1983); as Robin, Batman #368 (February,1984); as corpse, Batman #428 (Holiday, 1988); as Red Hood, Batman #635 (December, 2004); as Nightwing, Nightwing #118 (May, 2006); as Red Robin, Countdown to Final Crisis #17 (January, 2008).
Origin: This version of Jason Todd, the son of a loving mother who dies of poor health and a small-time hoodlum whom Two-Face has murdered, is a street orphan stealing the Batmobile’s tires when the Dark Knight first meets him. Lonely after Dick Grayson outgrows the Robin role and becomes Nightwing, Batman decides that Jason stands his best chance in life if Bruce Wayne adopts the boy. After Jason persists in trying to work on Batman’s cases, Bruce teaches him to redirect his criminal skills into crime-fighting. Though initially spunky, optimistic, and as gung-ho as Dick Grayson ever was, Jason turns increasingly distant, disrespectful, and disobedient. In one of his final appearances as Robin, he may have tossed a drug dealer to his deathe after the man, protected by diplomatic immunity, sadistically drives his abused girlfriend to suicide. “He slipped,” Jason claims.1 When Jason soon discovers that the late Catherine Todd wasn’t his biological mother, he sets off on a trek across the globe in search of his birth mom. He repeatedly crosses paths with the Joker, in a series of coincidences that strain credulity far beyond the suspension of disbelief comics already require, until the clown beats the boy nearly to death with a crowbar and then finishes the job with a bomb. Batman arrives too late. Jason is dead.
Jason gets better.
Reality-wrenching events of the series Infinite Crisis2 resurrect Jason inside his coffin. He claws his way out and up through the earth only to emerge from his grave brain-damaged. His mind and personality do not fully return until Talia al Ghul immerses him in her father’s Lazarus Pit.f Finally, fully restored, Jason is stunned to learn that the Joker still lives. That hurts. The question that sears at Jason is not how he came back from the dead, but why he has gone unavenged. Confused, disappointed, and angry at Batman, the young man adopts a new identity as the Red Hood, taking a name the Joker once used, and returns to Gotham as a brutally violent vigilante who also shakes down the mob. When Batman assumes Jason is angry that he failed to prevent this ex-Robin’s death, Jason tells him, “Bruce, I forgive you for not saving me. But why … why on God’s Earth is he still alive!!??”
Jason: Ignoring what he’s done in the past. Blindly, stupidly, disregarding the entire graveyards he’s filled, the thousands who have suffered, the friends he’s crippled, I thought … I thought killing me—that I’d be the last person you’d ever let him hurt. If it had been you that he beat to a bloody mass, if it had been you that he left in agony, if he had taken you from this world, I would have done nothing but search the planet for this pathetic pile of evil, death-worshipping garbage and sent him off to hell.3
Diagnoses
When Batman first meets the boy, Jason shows behaviors associated with conduct disorder, a repetitive, persistent pattern of violating societal norms and the rights of others, but of no more than moderate severity. On the one hand, Jason chooses his lifestyle of fending for himself rather than becoming a ward of the state, while on the other hand, he is not out to hurt anyone. Severe conduct disorder would involve acts of cruelty or inflicting considerable harm—behavior more heinous than truancy, running away, or stealing to get by.
At first, Jason readily adapts to his new role as Batman’s partner and Bruce Wayne’s son and no longer shows any disruptive behavior disorder, but over the course of the next year he becomes “very moody, resentful, reckless,” with “a dangerously high level of aggressive energy to work off,” and Batman worries that Jason’s attitude “is about to get him killed.”4 Batman tells Alfred he “may have started Jason as Robin before he had a chance to come to grips with his parents’ deaths.” Bouts of crying over his parents’ photo yet refusing to talk about it, together with his moodiness, may indicate that Jason has developed posttraumatic stress disorder. Anger and aggression may be the tools he’s using to repel depression or feelings of guilt over having replaced his parents with his adoptive dad. The overall pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior fits oppositional defiant disorder—like conduct disorder, one of the disruptive behavior disorders—and this stubborn, disobedient pattern gets him killed.
Technically, the grown Jason fits the criteria for antisocial personality disorder through his aggressiveness, deceitfulness, repeated unlawful behavior, and lack of remorse, although we have to evaluate these in the context
of the world in which he lives. Superheroes, like spies and undercover police, use aggression and deceit as tricks of the trade. He is a man on a mission. Like Marvel Comics’ Punisher or Batman’s inspiration, the Shadow, he slays evildoers. “I’ve killed. Not murdered,” he originally insists, although he also threatens that “death may come to those who stand in my way of doing what’s right.”5 Judging him by the standards of normal society, even comparing him to superheroes, he still seems fairly antisocial.
When authorities lock him in Arkham Asylum on the grounds that he will be safer there than in a prison’s general population, he successfully petitions the court for transfer to Gotham City Corrections on the grounds that he is legally sane.
Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight (Wiley Psychology & Pop Culture) Page 25
