13. Aronson & Carlsmith (1963); Cooper (2010).
14. Langley et al. (2011).
15. Meston & Frohlich (2003).
16. Takeuchi (2006).
17. Murstein, Reif, & Syracuse-Siewert (2002).
18. Regan (1998).
19. Penton-Voak et al. (2001); Rhodes (2006).
20. Fink, Neave, Manning, & Grammer (2006).
21. Jokela (2009); Rhodes, Simmons, & Peters (2005).
22. Engemann & Owyang (2005); Persico, Postlewaite, & Silverman (2004).
23. Judge, Hurst, & Simon (2009); Langlois et al. (2000).
24. Dion (1972).
25. Clifford & Walster (1973); Rich (1975).
26. Sigall & Ostrove (1973).
27. Castellow, Wuensch, & Moore (1990).
28. Darby & Jeffers (1988); DeSantis & Kayson (1997); Erian et al. (1998).
29. Kulka & Kessler (1978).
30. Erian et al. (1998).
31. Sigall & Ostrove (1975).
32. Batman #1 (1940).
33. Batman #244 (1972).
34. Batman #244 (1972).
35. Batman #1 (1940).
36. Batman #15 (1943).
37. Kane & Andrae (1989), 107.
38. Uslan (2004), 5.
39. Detective Comics #233 (1956).
40. Daniels (1999), 91; York (2000).
41. Daniels (1999), 92.
42. Batman #144 (1961).
43. Daniels (), 94.
44. Batman #119 (1958); Detective Comics #309 (1962).
45. Batman #128 (1959); Batman #147 (1962); Detective Comics #292 (1961); Detective Comics #275 (1960).
46. Detective Comics #485 (1979).
47. Batman #197 (1967).
48. 52 #11 (2006).
49. Batman #232 (1971).
50. DC Special Series #15 (1978).
51. Kane & Andrae (1989), 129–131.
52. Hamm & Skaaren (1988).
53. Batman #703 (2010).
54. Bruce Wayne: The Road Home: Ra’s al Ghul (2010).
55. Langley et al. (2011).
56. Detective Comics #470 (1977).
57. Detective Comics #475 (1978).
58. Detective Comics #475 (1978).
59. Greenberger (1992).
60. Moderating Langley et al. (2011).
61. Winch (1958).
62. Buss (1985); Nangle et al. (2004).
63. Myers (2008), 401.
64. Detective Comics #556–557 (1985).
65. Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight Halloween Special #1 (1993).
66. Batman #612 (2003).
67. Audet & Everall (2010); Joinson (2001).
68. Myers (2008), 417.
69. Archer & Cook (1986).
70. Jourard (1964).
71. Detective Comics #751 (2000).
72. Batman: The 10-Cent Adventure #1 (2002).
73. Sprecher (2001); Sprecher & Hendrick (2004).
74. Batman #615 (2003); Batman Returns (1992 motion picture); The Brave and the Bold #197 (1983).
75. Batman #232 (1971).
76. DC Super Stars #17 (1977).
77. Identity Crisis #2 (2004).
78. Identity Crisis #6 (2005).
79. JLA #115–119 (2005).
80. Catwoman #50 (2006).
81. Catwoman #51 (2006).
82. Rhoades, Stanley, & Markman (2010).
83. Acevedo & Aron (2009); Coleman & Ganong (1990); Sternberg (1988).
84. Sternberg (1986); Sternberg (1997).
85. Kim & Hatfield (2004).
86. Karney (2008).
87. Ackerman, Griskevicius, & Li (2011); Brantley, Knox, & Zusman (2002).
88. Peplau & Gordon (1985).
89. Simpson, Campbell, & Berscheid (1986).
90. Emmers-Sommer, Warber, & Halford (2007).
91. Barbara (2008).
92. Abbey (1982).
93. For example, Batman Returns (1992 motion picture).
94. Catwoman #1 (2011).
95. Detective Comics #850 (2009).
Case File 11–1: Catwoman
1. Catwoman #18 (1995).
2. Catwoman #0 (1994).
3. Lindemann (2010).
4. The World (2010).
5. DSM-IV-TR.
6. Connolly (2006); Richters et al. (2008); Wright (2010).
7. Catwoman #46 (1997).
8. DSM-IV-TR, 667–669.
9. Dannon, Lowengrub, Lancu, & Kotler (2004); Grant & Odlaugh (2008); Yates (2000).
10. Grant (2006).
11. Dannon (2002); Durst et al. (2001).
12. Cameron (1964); Deng (1997); Russell (1973).
13. Sarasalo, Bergman, & Toth (1997).
14. U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (2004).
15. Cromwell & Olson (2004); Merry & Harsent (2000).
16. Bernasco (2006); Miethe, McCorkle, & Listwan (2006).
17. Walsh (1980).
18. Catwoman #39 (1996).
19. Catwoman #38 (1996).
20. Catwoman #1 (2002).
21. Gotham City Sirens #22 (2011).
22. Alarid et al. (1996); Pope (1977).
23. Decker, Wright, Redfern, & Smith (1993).
24. Mullins & Wright (2003).
25. Laidler & Hunt (2001); Maher (1997); Miller (2001); Phoenix (2000).
26. Catwoman #1 (2002).
27. Catwoman #59 (1998).
aPlease note that this is not an argument in favor of hazing. Appropriate, nicer team-building activities can promote team cohesion (Van Raalte, Cornelius, Linder, & Brewer, 2007).
bAfter he removes her old lady disguise, that is, while telling her, “Quiet or papa spank!”
cAnd later becomes a cyborg secret agent, but that’s a different story.
dMore than once through multiple incarnations, although as of 2011’s Catwoman #1, Selina once again doesn’t know. So she’ll get to find out all over again sometime.
12
The Fathers
Why Do We Fall?
“For an orphan, this guy has a lot of father figures.”1
—comic book writer Len Wein, creator of Lucius Fox2
Growing up without his parents, Bruce doesn’t get to learn from their example of how couples interact, work together, and resolve conflicts. A child with a single parent can learn from how that parent manages relationships. Bruce has no live example, good or bad, only early memories. A younger child doesn’t give a lot of thought to how other people interact and relate to one another, and even the best parents may conceal many things from younger children, from friction when it arises between them to their more affectionate moments as well. As Bruce grows, his understanding of his parents does not progress naturally by observing, appraising, and reassessing them with a maturing point of view. If Alfred dates anyone while Bruce is growing up, he probably shields Bruce from seeing any signs of it, like those single parents who prefer not to introduce their dates to the kids.
They get him started, though. He trusts them, they encourage him to be autonomous instead of doubting himself, and he develops great initiative (the earliest psychosocial stages in Erikson’s theory: Trust vs. Mistrust, Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt, Initiative vs. Guilt—see chapter 10); not perfectly in all areas, though, or he’d be less ready to distrust all adults interested in taking him in.3 In debates over whether Bruce Wayne’s parents were raising him Catholic or Episcopalian, those who focus on his great guilt as their proof that he must be Catholic, aside from stereotyping, are underestimating many people’s capacity for guilt.4 Anger motivates him more than guilt, and more than anger, the need to look out for others because there was no one to look out for the family Wayne takes priority. “My anger outweighs my guilt,” he tells Henri Ducard in Batman Begins. Would-be father figure Ducard, out to replace the Waynes’ ideals with his own while overestimating how much he and Bruce have in common, tries to manipulate the type of guilt he assumes Bruce has buried beneath his rage in order to turn the young man again
st his birth father. “Your parents’ death was not your fault. It was your father’s! Anger does not change the fact that your father failed to act.” This “truth” Ducard wants him to confront doesn’t convince Bruce Wayne. He stays loyal to his parents’ memory, even if he has yet to reconcile his need for violence with the values they promoted. He quests not for their ghosts’ approval—so he thinks.
Attachment
What happens when catastrophic circumstances cut children off from their parents? Attachment theory, an important idea in developmental psychology regarding the dynamics of long-term relationships, arose in answer to such a question. During the Blitz of World War II, when Nazi Germany spent months repeatedly bombing London plus other British military and industrial centers, trying to damage the British war economy and demoralize the British into surrendering, the air raids’ ongoing threat kept citizens afraid for their lives and terrified for the safety of those who meant most to them: their children. Over a quarter of London’s population evacuated to the countryside. Not all displaced families had anywhere to go, but some citizens who lived in those more remote areas volunteered to take in war orphans and to house other people’s children. Later, families reunited. Physically, the children had come out fine. Psychologically, they had not. Separated from their parents at a crucial developmental period, they grew into adolescents and young adults displaying an alarming variety of psychological disorders and relationship difficulties.5 Familial disruption during the formative years had thrown them off track.
Trying to make sense of the mass child evacuation’s long-term consequences, psychologist John Bowlby launched a long line of studies on parent-child bonds. Mary Ainsworth, building on his work, concluded that people have different attachment styles, patterns in how people bond and seek closeness from others.6 Infants attach to adults who meet their needs with consistent, sensitive care. The strength of infants’ attachment to familiar people, particularly their primary caregivers, predicts their tendencies to connect to others throughout their lives. Consistent with Erik Erikson’s idea that infants develop lifelong readiness to trust or mistrust depending on how dependably parents provide for them, parental responses sculpt their children’s attachment styles which, in turn, shape the growing individuals’ feelings, thoughts, and expectations in later relationships.7 Ainsworth originally identified three main patterns: one secure and two insecure styles.8 The securely attached child, feeling safe and supported, will freely explore the environment and engage with strangers when the primary caregiver is present. Visibly distressed if the parent leaves the child in a strange situation, this child will be happy upon the parent’s return. The anxious-ambivalent child has mixed feelings, having received enough attention and interaction to want the parent but too inconsistently to trust. Afraid to explore, wary of strangers, and distressed if the parent departs, this child keeps close and yet, after the parent returns from briefly stepping outside, shows the parent resentment and resists when the parent initiates interaction. The anxious-avoidant child has been neglected. The child avoids or ignores caregivers and other adults, doesn’t explore much, shows little emotion when parents depart or return, and in fact shows limited emotional range regardless of the situation. Because expressions of feelings and needs have gone too often unrewarded, the child expects communication to have little effect. In adulthood, people can avoid intimacy for different reasons: The avoidant adult who wants connections to others but is too scared to interact is fearful-avoidant while the one who really doesn’t care is dismissing-avoidant.9 Mary Main later added a fourth childhood style, disorganized, for children who lack any coherent pattern of coping with others. The ambivalent and avoidant styles, while less effective than the secure, are nevertheless strategies for human interactions. Disorganized children mostly know fear. Their caregivers come across to them as either frightened or, like Scarecrow Jonathan Crane’s grandmother, frightening. Interactions are so erratic that the child develops no interpersonal perspective, no general expectations about human behavior, no coherent sense of self.10
The securely attached person shows grief following serious losses, feels less anger toward whomever they lost, and suffers less depression than the insecure types.11 Bereavement leads to greater personal growth among the securely attached, although throughout all the styles, violent death yields more complicated grief responses than nonviolent.12 As noted with the consequences of the London Blitz evacuations, disruptions to family life in violent times can reroute attachment styles and muddle or ruin interpersonal expectations. Some people adapt to loss and interruptions by withdrawing from others, attempting to use avoidance to reduce the pain and fear of further loss—it helps some, it hinders others.13 Trauma, unresolved mourning, and other disruptions increase disorganization.14 When previous expectations no longer fit new circumstances, the child’s very personality may go into turmoil.
Bruce Wayne shows characteristics of both secure and dismissing-avoidant attachment. For someone who so values his independence and self-sufficiency, he has spent a lot of time learning from mentors, teaming up with other crime-fighters, training apprentices, and relying on the assistance and cooperation of a police commissioner and family butler. He cycles between dealing only with those last two and working with a sprawling, extended Bat-Family. If he completed the Experiences in Close Relationships Scale15 (one test that measures attachment styles in adults) with complete honesty, he’d peg every avoidance item on the list as a good fit for himself. Consider these sample avoidance statements:
I prefer not to show a partner how I feel deep down.
Just when my partner starts to get close to me, I find myself pulling away.
I don’t feel comfortable opening up to romantic partners.
I don’t mind asking romantic partners for comfort, advice, or help. (reversed)
I tell my partner just about everything. (reversed)
I find it relatively easy to get close to my partner. (reversed)
Terrible things exist in this world. He knows that well. Crime, despair, and decadence abound. As if all the gangsters and drug lords and killers of the kind who took his parents weren’t enough, sadists and serial monsters motivated by delights darker than economic need and greed are out there to destroy lives for their own amusement or to satisfy other cravings. Despite all that, Batman is, in his own way, oddly optimistic. He believes in love. He believes in warm, trusting families who deserve better than to suffer at the whims of the dangerous minority. He believes in rehabilitation, even offering it to the Joker right after the clown has shot and paralyzed Barbara Gordon. “We could work together. I could rehabilitate you. You needn’t be out there on the edge any more. You needn’t be alone. We don’t have to kill each other.”16 It’s a qualified belief, though, as he can be skeptical—and rightly so—when criminals like the Riddler and Penguin profess to turn a new leaf and go straight. He keeps an eye on them while hoping it works out for the better. The mugger who taught him bloodshed adds to Bruce’s education about life without erasing the lessons his optimistic parents already imparted. As Bruce tells his would-be father figure during Batman Begins, his enemy who, in the name of justice, wants to destroy the city his parents believed in, “Gotham isn’t beyond saving. Give me more time. There are good people here.”
Antisocial personality disorder appears more commonly among dismissing-avoidant adults, but Batman’s better-known nemeses act like ambivalent children, both resenting him and aching for his attention. The comic book incarnation of Henri Ducard (an unethical mentor who taught Bruce detective skills, not secretly Ra’s al Ghul) observes that Batman functions as a lightning rod for grandiose criminals ostensibly motivated by greed, revenge, or power when “their true agenda is always the same: to cast Batman in the role of nemesis. Hence the puns, the riddles, the flagrant clues in their collective wake—daring their foe to penetrate the obvious. He always triumphs. If he failed, they’d be bereft. The pas de deux would have no point. Like naughty children, who tempt the wrat
h of a stern, demanding father. They seek only to shock him by the enormity of their transgressions. It’s the moment of acknowledgement they crave.”17
The Bad Fathers
Ducard is one example of a failed father figure. Training Bruce as a manhunter, detective Henri Ducard shows him the uses of viciousness, cunning, and deception. Amoral, ruthless Ducard works for criminals as often as he does the law. Outraged when Ducard’s effort to track a fugitive leads unnecessarily to the man’s death, Bruce shouts, “You become as bad as anyone you hunt!” The smug mentor tells him no, “I have not become—I always was. I am. As are you.” Both eventually regret having parted on such terms.18 Years later, Ducard deduces Batman’s identity but keeps it to himself.
Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight (Wiley Psychology & Pop Culture) Page 30
