The fictional Dr. Adams, although one of Arkham’s better clinicians, also gets a number of things wrong, so take that with a grain of salt. If we cannot diagnose him more specifically, whether because he’s Adams’s Lord of Misrule or because we lack solid information, can we at least determine whether he’s really insane? The Joker has murdered many, including Commissioner Gordon’s second wife and Batman’s second Robin, and can continue creating tragedy because in Gotham, as in real life, the criminally insane evade execution. The Joker himself asserts, “I’m not mad at all. I’m just differently sane,”3 but how would he know? Insane individuals have limited, if any, ability to recognize their own shortcomings. When Jason Todd tells the Joker, “You’re not nearly as crazy as you’d like us all to believe. Or even as crazy as you’d like to believe. It just makes it easier to justify every sick, monstrous thing you’ve ever done when you play the part of the mad clown. You’re crazy, bubba—but you ain’t that crazy,” the clown loses his smile.5
One Arkham therapist argues that the Joker’s actions, however bizarre, reveal “a sane man who willfully causes anguish and clearly enjoys it.” From “Case Study” by Paul Dini and Alex Ross.4 © DC Comics.
Between his criminal rampages, the Joker sometimes experiences melancholy spells when he either grows bored or feels frustrated by his own failures—ergo consequences of circumstances and not because he’s cycling between the extremes of bipolar disorder (still known to many by its old name, manic depression). Bipolar individuals alternate between depression and the extremely energized, elated state known as mania in cycles due to brain chemistry, not randomly up and down from one day to the next, not due to a psychotic disorder, and not due to the individual’s ingrained personality traits. The Joker is more maniacal than manic. When the Joker occasionally goes off to sulk on his own for a while, he does so in response to specific circumstances. He doesn’t have as much fun as he did in his earlier days. As a former henchman put it, the Joker has “become a sullen, psychotic creep.”6 Though not cycles, the Joker’s history has gone through four distinct stages:
1. Ace of Knaves (sane killer)—early in the Golden Age of Comics: During his first two years in print (1940–1942), the Joker murders many victims. In 1942, DC Comics creators sensitive to mounting public concern over comic book violence ended the Joker’s killing spree with “The Joker Walks the Last Mile,” a tale that sees the Joker executed for all his previous crimes. Quickly revived by henchmen after his electrocution while having paid the penalty for past offenses, the Joker walks free until apprehended for new robberies by the story’s end.7
2. Clown Prince of Crime (kooky crook)—later Golden Age and all of the Silver Age (1956 until about 1970): For more than three decades, the Joker restricts himself to committing wacky crimes. Rather than murder people, he would instead resort “to pulling off astonishing crimes in ludicrous situations, often with preposterous gadgets.”8 Regardless of his antics, writers depicted him as legally sane, as illustrated by one story in which he briefly fakes insanity so he can go to a less restrictive insane asylum instead of the state prison.9,h
3. King of Arkham Asylum (insane killer)—Bronze Age (about 1970 to 1986): After a four-year absence from the Batman titles, 1973’s “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge!”10 brought him into the post-Vietnam era as a killer deemed legally insane, now escaping from an asylum instead of prison. A Joker crazier than ever resumes killing while now facing a Batman darker than he has been since 1939.
4. Harlequin of Hate (personal killer)—Modern Age: After decades of doing our heroes no real harm, the Joker begins maiming and killing some of the people closest to Batman and Commissioner Gordon: He cripples Gordon’s daughter, Barbara;11 kills Batman’s second Robin, Jason;12 and kills the Commissioner’s second wife, Sarah.13
When he starts killing again in the 1970s, the Joker also starts trying to teach the world some deadly lessons. Those lessons grow more abstract over time, from killing a family to make Gotham’s citizens afraid to testify against criminals14 early in that third stage to crippling Barbara Gordon in order to make a point about human nature. Because the world makes no sense to the Joker, the fact that anyone else believes it does bothers him. After he shoots Barbara as part of an effort to drive her father insane, he assumes—wrongly—that he has demonstrated that there’s no difference between himself and everyone else. “All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That’s how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.”
Joker: When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was, I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can’t you? I mean, you’re not unintelligent! You must see the reality of the situation.… It’s all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for—it’s all a monstrous, demented gag. So why can’t you see the funny side? Why aren’t you laughing?
Batman: Because I’ve heard it before—and it wasn’t funny the first time.15
The Joker has always tried to reshape reality to fit himself, starting with the first crime he ever commits in the comics, when his Joker-toxin leaves a rictus grin on the dead millionaire he just robbed. “He wants to permanently stamp his unique face on nature, to transform the world in his image,” writes comics scholar Peter Coogan. “He seeks to make the world comprehensible by transforming it into a twisted parody of himself,”16 like the time he gives his face to Gotham’s fish in “The Laughing Fish,”17 a story often cited as the proof that the Joker truly is out of touch with reality.18 Expecting to reap millions by copyrighting fish disfigured with hideous clown faces after he dumps toxins in the local waters, the Joker simply does not understand why he cannot copyright fish, nor the fact that threatening to kill the copyright clerk cannot get him what he wants. “‘The Laughing Fish’ was my attempt to try to show that this guy just wasn’t logical,” said author Steve Englehart. “I really wanted to come up with some concept that was just insane on the face of it. I mean, the whole idea of copyrighting fish based on dumping chemicals into the ocean and trying to get the government to go along with it, anybody else would look at this and go, ‘That’s clearly not sane.’”19 Psychologist Robin Rosenberg has wondered, though, whether this proves insanity or simply failure to understand copyright law.20
Do those fish prove the Joker really is insane after all? From Detective Comics #475, cover by Marshall Rogers & Terry Austin. © DC Comics.
“I took Gotham’s White Knight and I brought him down to our level. Madness, as you know, is a lot like gravity: All it takes is a little push.”
—The Joker (Heath Ledger) in The Dark Knight (2008 motion picture)
Notes
1. Batman #258 (1974).
2. Lovecraft (1937).
3. Lytle (2008).
4. Arkham Asylum: Living Hell #1 (2003).
5. Lytle (2008), 117.
6. Porter (2002).
7. Rush (1815).
8. Gamwell & Tomes (1995).
9. Batman #618 (2003).
10. Daily (2011).
11. Batman: The Long Halloween #3 (1998).
12. Bender, Kambam, & Pozios (2009); Daniels (2008); Davidson (2011); Lytle (2008).
13. Nichols (2006).
14. Detective Comics #1 (2011).
15. Daniels (2008), 205.
16. Arkham Asylum: Living Hell #4 (2003).
17. Gotham City Sirens #21 (2011).
18. Lazarus & Zur (2002).
19. Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, 1989. Again.
20. Detective Comics #865 (2010).
21. Detective Comics #864 (2010).
22. Detective Comics #1–2 (2011).
23. Wang et al. (2005); Wilson, Dyszynski, & Mant (2003).
24. Harris et al. (2005); Marshall et al. (2005).
25. R. M. Langley, personal communication (June 24, 2011).
26. Green (2001).
27. Keefe et al. (2007); McEvoy et al. (2007).
28. Lehman (1998).
29. Batman: Poison Ivy (1997).
30. Meltzer (1982); Schmid & Wanderer (2007); Segredou, Livaditis, Liolios, & Skartsila (2008).
31. Detective Comics #824 (2006).
Case File 8–1: The Mad Hatter
1. Secret Six #6 (2007).
2. Batman and Robin #21 (2011).
3. Gotham Central #20 (2004).
4. Secret Six #4 (2006).
5. DSM-IV-TR.
6. Secret Six #3 (2006).
7. Secret Six #6 (2007).
8. Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1989); Batman: Streets of Gotham #4 (2009).
9. Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight Halloween Special #2 (1994).
10. Holmes & Holmes (2009); National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (1985).
Case File 8–2: Harley Quinn
1. Gotham City Sirens #7 (2010).
2. The New Batman Adventures, episode 21, “Mad Love” (January 16, 1999).
3. Gotham City Sirens #1 (2009).
4. Batman: Harley Quinn (1999).
5. DSM-IV-TR, 721–725.
6. The Batman Adventures: Mad Love (1994); Suicide Squad #6–7 (2012).
7. The New Batman Adventures, episode 21, “Mad Love” (January 16, 1999).
8. Gotham City Sirens #24 (2011).
9. DSM-IV-TR, 332–334.
10. Suicide Squad #1 (2011).
11. Gotham City Sirens #6 (2010).
12. Rosenberg, Langley, Robinson, Englehart, Ulsan, & West (2009).
13. The Batman Adventures: Mad Love (1994).
Case File 8–3: The Joker
1. Detective Comics #168 (1951).
2. Batman: The Killing Joke (1988).
3. Batman and Robin #13–14 (2010).
4. Batman Black and White, Volume 2 (2002).
5. Batman #649 (2006).
6. Gotham City Sirens #6 (2010).
7. Detective Comics #64 (1942).
8. Gold (1988), 9.
9. Batman #74 (1952–1953).
10. Batman #251 (1973).
11. Batman: The Killing Joke (1988).
12. Batman #427–428 (1988).
13. Detective Comics #741 (2000).
14. The Brave and the Bold #111 (1974).
15. Batman: The Killing Joke (1988).
16. Coogan (2006), 109.
17. Detective Comics #475 (1978).
18. For example, Ingersoll (2003).
19. Rosenberg et al. (2009).
20. Langley & Rosenberg (2011).
aAlso spelled M’Naughten or McNaghton, depending on the source.
bThe White Knight, a mission-oriented psychotic villain, kills the Tetches as part of his campaign to remove all the Arkham Asylum villains’ relatives from this world in case they, too, might turn evil (Batman and Robin #1, 2011).
cIn other words, not devices used for tactile sexual stimulation.
d Point of contention: Psychiatrists have completed their psychiatric residencies. Medical school comes before internship; internship comes before residency, although the internship year could possibly be the first year of residency. Let’s chalk this one up to Harley arriving at Arkham as an intern, maybe also working at a regular hospital during that first year, and then completing her psychiatric residency there before turning outlaw.
eMiller: “Bruno was a woman, a cohort of the Joker. He never had sex with her because sex is death to him. Put more accurately, death is sex.” (Sharrett, 1991, p. 37)
fAn Easter egg (hidden surprise) image of Harley’s positive pregnancy test stick in the 2011 video game Batman: Arkham City confirms nothing but certainly keeps the topic stirred up.
g“The concept was mine. Bill finished that first script from my outline of the persona and what should happen in the first story … so he really was co-creator. And Bob and I did the visuals, so Bob was also.”—Jerry Robinson, personal communication, June 23, 2009.
hThat story’s court-appointed diagnostician, fooled by the Joker, diagnoses him as having “hebeophrenic schizophrenia.” Hebephrenia is an alternate name for what the DSM-IV-TR calls disorganized schizophrenia, a type of schizophrenia marked by inappropriate emotions and disorganized behavior and speech rather than hallucinations and delusions. The hebe-prefix refers to youth because this condition tends to start earlier in life than do other forms of schizophrenia.
9
The Psychodynamic Duo
Freud and Jung on Batman and Robin
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) died the year Batman debuted, the month before the character’s origin saw print. While the founder of psychoanalysis never commented on our hero’s background, he wrote a great deal on related topics, from which we might infer what he’d have had to say about the character. The role of early childhood experience and the power of trauma to route the course of personality, the very things that created Batman, fascinated Freud. To him, early experiences create conflicts and unconscious turmoil we wrestle with throughout our lives. Conscious of the circumstances that drive him, Batman in many ways is ahead of most people.
Freud, perhaps the most famous figure in the history of psychiatry and psychology, developed the first and best-known formal theory of personality. Many later personality theories arose either to elaborate upon or to oppose Freud’s views. He stirred controversy with his proclamation (soon withdrawn) of cocaine as a wonder drug for treating mood disorders1 and his psychodynamic perspective, which asserted that our own minds play tricks on us, that unconscious processes that elude awareness guide our conscious lives, and that the human sex drive spurs personality development from infancy into adulthood.2 A number of followers who initially intended only to expand upon his theory—like Carl Jung, Karen Horney, and Erik Erikson—each came to veer away as their ideas came to contradict his, often beginning with disagreements over sexuality’s role.3 Rather than minimize the importance of the unconscious mind like some neo-Freudians, Carl Jung emphasized it more heavily than Freud, adding a deeper dimension popular in the study of heroes: the collective unconscious shared throughout our species.4 Despite controversies, both Freud and Jung remain influential to this day and provide frameworks for analyzing fictional characters and their stories.
Most psychologists are not Freudians. Freud’s ideas frequently lacked falsifiability—disprovability, meaning that no conceivable empirical outcome could have contradicted him. He said stairways in dreams represent sexual intercourse.5 You can’t prove that wrong any more than you can prove that no organ grinder ever played cribbage in any of your ancestors’ kitchens. Einstein asserted that faster-than-light travel is impossible. Because a single supraluminal jaunt would refute his assertion, the idea itself—whether right or wrong—was scientific. One important reason why Carl Jung broke away from Freud was that Jung, although a religious man, felt that dogma in any form—in Freud’s case, his insistence that sexual foundations underlay all psychological development—had no place in an empirical discipline.
Nevertheless, we can easily speculate on what Freud might have said about Batman. He said a great deal about how traumatic experiences will affect boys at around the age Bruce was when his parents died.
Freud’s Psychodynamic Foundations
The cornerstone of Freud’s psychoanalysis was his view that the unconscious mind continually influences us in ways the conscious mind does not realize. In his view, early experiences shape personality and create inner conflicts we wrestle with throughout our lives. This unconscious turmoil stirs up difficulties in conscious life.
He felt that we have two main instincts driving our behavior: a life instinct that he called Eros for the Greek god of erotic love and a death instinct he called Thanatos for the Greek god of death. He had much more to say about the life instinct. We spend all our time being alive and only a certain portion of it focusing on death and destruction. The life instinct or libido (all mental energy) would drive sex, activity, construction, creativity, hunger, and all the activities involved in keeping us and our species going—the kind of things for which playboy Bruce Wayne pret
ends to live. So Batman’s ongoing effort to save lives, as a life-oriented activity, would be his form of sexual expression on Planet Freud. Seeing this as one wide-ranging instinct, Freud considered it all sexual in nature. The death instinct, on the other hand, would prompt aggression, destruction, and preoccupation with morbid topics. Dwelling on this could create antisocial or suicidal inclinations. The death instinct can serve life. Sometimes you need to fight off the wolves. Sometimes you must demolish one thing in order to build another. Batman’s aggression and his terrifying image help him shield others from fates like his family’s.
Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight (Wiley Psychology & Pop Culture) Page 20