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

by Langley, Travis

  “A perfect crime is a work of art, a thing of beauty, and a joy forever, to paraphrase the Bard!”

  —Penguin, Detective Comics #611 (February, 1990)

  CASE FILE 7–3 Poison Ivy

  Real name: Pamela Lillian Isley (Dr. in some versions)

  First appearance: Batman #181 (June, 1966)

  Origin: A botany/biochemistry student writing her thesis on plant-animal hybridization, shy, timid Pamela Isley gets seduced and betrayed by a man who poisons her, altering her biochemistry in a way that renders her body immune to all toxins, her kiss toxic to others, and her mood subject to violent swings. Unable to bear children, she experiments with creating plant-based life forms she calls her “children.” Robbing and killing to fund her research, she becomes an eco-terrorist, an environmentally motivated terrorist dedicated to preserving plant life at all costs. She creates pheromonal scents that make others, especially men, susceptible to her influence. Over time, she becomes more plantlike herself—her skin turns green; she develops an empathic link with plants and then the florakinetic ability to control them through sheer will—and Poison Ivy evolves into a formidable foe.

  The greener she grows, the less human she becomes. Despite some attraction to Batman and others, more apparent earlier in her criminal career, Ivy grows detached from humanity and less interested in people over time. Her best and sometimes only friend is the Joker’s moll, Harley Quinn, whose friendship helps ground Ivy not only by reconnecting Ivy to the human race but because Ivy tends to think more sensibly when faced with Harley’s irrationality. Unlike fellow eco-terrorist Ra’s al Ghul, who wants to reduce the human population and would destroy all civilization if he thought it necessary to keep people from destroying the planet, Ivy’s ecological efforts concentrate on preserving and promoting plant life—more positive than Ra’s, albeit twistedly so, since she’ll kill individual guards who might keep her from stealing what she needs and she periodically hunts down corporate bigwigs whose companies have destroyed forests and her floral “children.”

  A plant-human hybrid with chlorophyll in her blood, she has no interest in destroying humankind, nor in saving it, but she still knows she’s more than a vegetable. “I can’t deny I’m a creation of both the plant and human worlds. I can’t stay in one too long before I begin to miss the other.”1 When she feels both sides of her nature in balance, she takes a biocentrist (“life-centered”) perspective, an ethical viewpoint extending value to all species, ecosystems, and natural processes, regardless of sentience. During her biocentrist spells, she helps feed fruit to the homeless and underprivileged instead of feeding people to her plants, not that these periods last. Her empathy for plant life, a kind of psychic link to vegetation, intrudes on her already limited ability to feel for non-plant life. A child of wealthy but distant parents, she never learns how to get close to others. Receiving no empathy growing up, she never develops any of her own. The fascination she feels for plants while growing up may come about in compensation. Loving plants is safe because they will not reject, chide, or abandon her. Empathy, the capacity to recognize and share others’ feelings, eludes her until mutagenic changes force her to feel what the plants around her experience—just plants, not people. Still not attuned to other people’s feelings and never having learned outgoing social skills, she relishes her biochemical power over others instead. When she ponders why she doesn’t move into a jungle and stay, she considers, “Perhaps it’s the power I exert over others that keeps driving me back. I like a challenge and I can’t rest when I feel I haven’t won.”

  The comic books keep referring to her power over other people as pheromonal, but is it really? A pheromone is a social scent, a chemical that triggers a natural behavioral response by members of the same species. Our bodies detect pheromones through our sense of smell, affecting us through our olfactory system even if we don’t consciously realize it at the time. Sex pheromones attract mates, typically the female of the species emitting pheromones that indicate her sexual receptivity, as opposed to releaser pheromones, which can attract mates from miles away without eliciting a direct sexual response. While Ivy has greater power over men, she can influence women as well, like when she makes Catwoman deliver a case of money to her.2 Organisms can release some types of pheromones that will affect members of the same sex, like aggregation pheromones, which will bring members of the same species together regardless of gender. If she gave more thought to the range of people’s feelings, Ivy might try using alarm pheromones to trigger fight-or-flight responses, thereby making people turn violent or fearful. To the extent that Ivy’s influence is plant-based, the power is not pheromonal because humans and plants are different species. Botanical biochemist that she is, Ivy evidently realizes that. When she attempts unsuccessfully to make Catwoman disclose Batman’s identity, Ivy calls the particular chemical she releases a toxin, not a pheromone.3

  “I am not insane. I’ve just been pushed too far.”

  —Poison Ivy, Batman: Poison Ivy (1997)

  Notes

  1. Debuted in Batman #59 (1950); turned assassin in Detective Comics #474 (1977).

  2. Batman: Shadow of the Bat #1 (1992); The Batman Chronicles #3 (1996).

  3. The Brave and the Bold #111 (1974).

  4. For example, Batman and Robin #20 (2011).

  5. Batman: Poison Ivy (1997).

  6. Detective Comics #734–735 (1999); Gotham City Sirens #8 (2010).

  7. Leary, Twenge, & Quinlivan (2006); Williams (2002).

  8. DSM-III through DSM-IV-TR.

  9. Blackburn & Coid (1997); Hare (1991).

  10. Halgin & Whitbourne (2009), 322.

  11. Millon (2004); Millon et al. (2000).

  12. Market (2009).

  13. Millon (1991).

  14. Detective Comics #611 (1990).

  15. Robin #130 (2004).

  16. Catwoman #12–15 (2002–2003).

  17. DSM-III-R.

  18. Abrams & Bromberg (2007).

  19. Segal, Coolidge, & Rosowsky (2000).

  20. Zuckerman (1979), 27.

  21. Daderman, Muerling, & Hallman (2001); Hobfoll, Rom, & Segal (1989).

  22. Schultz & Schultz (2009); Zuckerman (1983).

  23. Harpur, Hare, & Hakstian (1989).

  24. Detective Comics #475 (1978).

  25. The Batman Adventures: Mad Love (1994).

  26. Zuckerman (2004).

  27. Detective Comics #485 (1979).

  28. Secret Origins #6 (1986).

  29. DSM-IV-TR, 457.

  30. DSM-IV-TR, 457.

  31. Bonnie, Jeffries, & Low (2008); Clarke (1990).

  Case File 7–1: The Riddler

  1. Batman: Riddler—The Riddle Factory (1995).

  2. Countdown #33 (2007).

  3. Peterson, Kaasa, & Loftus (2009).

  4. Geraerts, Raymaekers, & Merckelbach (2008); Laney & Loftus (2005).

  5. Laney & Loftus (2008).

  6. Takarangi, Polaschek, Garry, & Loftus (2008).

  7. Batman television series (March 31, 1966), episode 24, “Give ‘em the Axe.”

  8. Batman #619 (2003).

  9. Batman #179 (1966).

  10. Batman: Gotham Adventures #11 (1999).

  11. Parikh (2008).

  12. DSM-IV-TR, 462.

  13. Detective Comics Annual #8 (1995).

  14. Detective Comics #822 (2006).

  15. For example, Trinity (2007–2008).

  16. Gotham City Sirens #3 (2009).

  17. Fromm (1964).

  18. Detective Comics Annual #8 (1995).

  19. Joker’s Asylum II: The Riddler #1 (2010).

  20. Batman #705 (2011).

  21. Batman #452–452 (1990).

  Case File 7–2: The Penguin

  1. Secret Origins Special #1 (1989).

  2. Countdown #29 (2007).

  3. Penguin: Pain and Prejudice #1 (2011).

  4. Just & Morris (2003).

  5. Adler (1930, 1933/1939).

  6. Batman Annual #11
(1987).

  7. Penguin: Pain and Prejudice #5 (2012).

  Case File 7–3: Poison Ivy

  1. Gotham City Sirens #7 (2010).

  2. Batman #608 (2002).

  3. Gotham City Sirens #2 (2009).

  8

  The Madhouse

  What Insanity?

  “Sometimes I question the rationality of my actions. And I’m afraid that when I walk through those asylum gates, when I walk into Arkham and the doors close behind me, it’ll be just like coming home.”

  —Batman in Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1989)

  Arkham Asylum, full name The Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, Arkham Hospital when first mentioned in print1 and occasionally Arkham Sanitarium, houses the criminals whom Gotham City’s legal system deems insane. Fittingly named after horror master H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional “ancient, mouldering, and subtly fearsome town,” the “witch-cursed, legend-haunted” Arkham, Massachusetts,2 this facility faces more escapes, infiltrations, riots, assaults, and impersonations during Batman’s career than some nations’ entire penal systems see in a century.

  Comics scholar Paul Lytle lists Arkham’s major problems: The inmates run the asylum; the inmates run away from the asylum; and the people hired to run the asylum should be inmates.3 It’s a horrible place where a white-collar criminal like Warren White can enter sane, simply faking mental illness to dodge a prison sentence,4 only to find himself mutilated by other residents, then lose his mind and become a freakish villain himself, the Great White Shark. “White went inside a criminal, but a sane one—greedy and immoral, but sane. Arkham made him into an insane supervillain. Arkham took a normal, white-collar criminal, and turned him into something more akin to the Riddler or Penguin.”5

  Insane Places

  The earliest asylums emerged during the Renaissance, originally founded by religious orders to care for and shelter those afflicted with mental illness, to give them refuge—i.e., asylum—from a world where they did not fit. These facilities began to pop up throughout Europe and, too quickly, problems set in. Overcrowding and budgetary problems created less humane conditions, and the patients became more like inmates, shackled and locked away where the world outside might forget them, problems that escalated for over 300 years. In 1793, a French asylum’s new administrator, the young physician Philippe Pinel, removed patients’ chains, let them come out to see sunlight, and ordered an end to physically brutal “treatments” that involved beatings and bloodletting.6 Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who would become known as the “Father of American psychiatry,” during this time campaigned for more humane housing for the mentally ill. Although he remained uncertain what to do with the mentally ill, he knew chains and dungeons couldn’t heal them. Rush decided patients needed to be treated like human beings, shown basic compassion and morality, an approach known as moral therapy, despite which his moral methods included bloodletting,7 enclosing patients in coffin-like boxes, and swinging them around to shake the madness out.8 Good intentions, right? Progress happened slowly. Dorothea Dix and many others later campaigned for more humane conditions in the mental hospitals, penitentiaries, jails, and almshouses that housed mentally ill individuals. Asylums for the criminally insane did not yet exist because, technically, neither did insanity.

  Insanity is a legal standard, not a medical classification or psychiatric diagnosis, one that excuses individual responsibility for committing criminal offenses on the grounds that those who lack rational awareness of what they’re doing need treatment, not punishment. The modern insanity defense began in 1843 with one Daniel M’Naghten,a who, driven by persecutory delusions that the British prime minister Sir Robert Peel had personally caused M’Naghten’s hardships, attempted to shoot Peel but instead killed Peel’s secretary. After the jury found M’Naghten not guilty by reason of insanity, ensuing controversy led to the M’Naghten Rule, the so-called “right/wrong” test, which required evidence that, due to mental disease or defect at the time of the crime, the defendant lacked the ability to understand the nature and quality—and therefore the wrongness—of his or her own actions. The M’Naghten Rule became the foundation for the insanity defense in Great Britain and America. Other standards that followed built from it, and U.S. states would vary on which standard they follow, particularly with regard to whether the defendant’s actions resulted from an irresistible impulse (inability to restrain one’s own actions due to mental defect), all of which changed with the Insanity Reform Act of 1984. Public outrage over a jury finding President Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin John Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity prompted changes in federal and many state laws. Some states began allowing courts the option of finding defendants guilty but mentally ill so that a defendant deemed to have been mentally ill at the time of the crime would receive treatment in a psychiatric facility until no longer mentally ill, then would go to a correctional facility to serve out the remainder of the sentence. The fact that Arkham residents like Two-Face may walk free during periods of sanity9 regardless of however many crimes they’ve committed, no matter how many people they’ve killed, indicates that the Gotham legal system found them not guilty by reason of insanity. Julian Day, a.k.a. the non-lethal criminal Calendar Man, appears to be one exception, as attorney James Daily notes at Law and the Multiverse.10 In The Long Halloween, authorities offer to commute Day’s sentence to time served if he’ll help stop an enigmatic serial killer called Holiday, an offer that makes sense only if Day is guilty but mentally ill.11 Had Day been found not guilty by reason of insanity, he’d have had no sentence to commute.

  Criminal commitment, committing someone involuntarily to a mental health facility when charged with a crime, is not limited to those who have already stood trial. Defendants who have yet to go to trial may get sent there for evaluation or to receive treatment when the trial cannot proceed until the defendant becomes competent to stand trial, able to understand what’s going on well enough to participate in his or her own defense. Some cases never go to trial if they involve defendants who never reach states of competence. Defendants who do not become competent may eventually be released without trial unless they’re considered dangerous—in which case civil commitment becomes necessary, the involuntary commitment to a mental health facility of persons deemed to be at significant risk of harming themselves or specific other persons.

  In the real world, would Batman’s enemies be found criminally insane? In most cases, no, experts agree they would not.12 Outlandish, difficult, even dangerous behaviors, actions so bizarre that any layperson would readily say, “That’s just crazy,” do not inherently mean the person has suffered a full-fledged break from reality. Jeffrey Dahmer ate people. His ways of thinking and feeling were out of sync with nearly everybody else’s. Wild ideas filled his head and dark desires drove him, but he knew what he was doing, he knew it was wrong, and he knew to conceal his evil deeds. While his personality test scores indicated emotional abnormalities, the tests did not indicate that he was psychotic.13 Thus a jury found Dahmer legally sane, criminally responsible for his actions, and he therefore went to prison, not any mental hospital, there to remain until a mentally ill inmate beat him to death with a broom handle. In Gotham City, he might have lived and escaped Arkham to kill again. However much some Gotham authorities might like to haul villains such as the Joker to prison14 like Dahmer instead of admitting him into a mental hospital like Hinckley, they don’t have that option because their courts have found the Joker insane.

  A psychotic person could be sane, contradictory as that might sound. To acquit by reason of insanity, the jury would have to believe defendants so mentally ill that they didn’t understand the nature of their actions or didn’t know that those actions were wrong. If your friend tells you to shoot your next-door neighbor, you know that it’s wrong, you shouldn’t do it, and you need some better friends. If a hallucinatory elephant tells you to shoot your neighbor, you might still know that it’s wrong
, you shouldn’t do it, and you need some better elephants. Friend or elephant, you’re still sane. If, on the other hand, you shoot the neighbor because you’re convinced he’s an extraterrestrial creature coming to suck out your brain, then in that case, you are unable to recognize the real-world meaning and wrongfulness of your actions, it’s a desperate act of self-defense insofar as you knew, and you should therefore be found insane. The villain Maxie Zeus thinks he is the king of the Greek gods. Having become increasingly delusional over time, he stops getting sentenced to Blackgate Penitentiary and starts winding up in Arkham Asylum instead.