Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight

People with agoraphobia have a fear of open spaces, an often crippling dread that renders its sufferers unable to go outside. Those with social phobia fear social situations. They want friends. They wish they could leap into social interactions, but they become so embarrassed and afraid that they end up avoiding the very thing they want most. All o

In the film Batman Begins, the adult Bruce returns to the site where some of his childhood fears first began. After climbing down through an old well, he pauses to stare into a gap in the earth, an ugly mouth of gaping rock that opens to darkness below, dripping water as if salivating at the chance to devour him. In that pause, he confronts the ten

Discomforts and dislikes that fall short of pathological fears are aversions, which disturb us without overpowering us. A phobia is a persistently intense and unrealistic fear that causes such distress or so significantly impairs function that it counts as a mental illness.

We can face our fears in blunt confrontation or in a roundabout manner, rapidly or gradually, directly or indirectly, in our actions or in our heads. Where older approaches like Freudian psychoanalysis would take months or years, however long the analyst might persist in exploring the origins of a client’s fear, behavioral and cognitive-behavioral

Many behaviors intentionally or inadvertently learned via classical conditioning might die out if the conditioned stimulus no longer precedes the unconditioned stimulus. If food no longer follows Pavlov’s bell as it did when he trained dogs to salivate at the sound of the bell, the cessation of the food will lead to extinction, an elimination of th

Medication works with the brain’s chemistry to relax the individual and help alleviate symptoms of fearfulness, especially for those who suffer panic attacks as part of their phobic response, but medication alone will not teach the person a new way to think. Some phobias require specific methods. Social skills training can help those with social ph

Alfred tells Bruce, before suggesting that Bruce doesn’t fully understand the Joker either. “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” Batman scares the mob into turning to the Joker. The Joker wants to scare everybody into turni

How does Batman know they’re telling the truth? He’s like many police interrogators, convinced they can spot a lie despite poor evidence that they really can,16 although Batman doesn’t even read Miranda rights before wresting information out of people. The predominant model of police interrogation used across the United States,17 the Reid method,18

Torture interrogation (physically or psychologically abusive questioning) does not yield reliable information29—despite which, people generally believe that it works well30 and that it is, therefore, in some cases justified. It produces behavioral effects, certainly, but in the areas of instilling terror and stifling opposition.31