Psychoanalysis of The Joker

Dark Knight was a smash hit for it’s fame, explosions, and chase scenes, but what really had me on the edge of my seat was perhaps the most riveting villain I had ever met—The Joker. The Joker is a mob-backed terrorist with suicidal tendencies and a textbook sociopath. He is not reasonable, he’s not afraid of anything, and the last thing he cares about in the world is himself. As Alfred explained to Bruce, “Some men just want to watch the world burn”. Given the tortured nature of our subject, I felt it fitting to call upon Dr. Sigmund Freud to be our Virgil on the journey into downward spiral that is the personality of this criminal mastermind.

Freud is the father of the psychoanalytic theory. He suggests that childhood experiences shape our personalities. To explore his theory, a wise man once told me that there are Four Questions that every good student of psychology will ask about a personality theory. The first question regards the structure of the theory. Freud developed a topographical model to explain personality with three separate parts that interact with one another; the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is carnal in nature and embodies our natural drives. They are like our instincts in that we do not consciously think about them. The superego is like our conscious; we internalize social norms and values and our superego is the partially conscious part of our mind that monitors our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The ego is our mostly conscious awareness that is in the middle of a tug of war between the id and the superego.

The second question asks for the motivation in his theory. Freud introduces the pleasure principle; a hedonistic notion that we are motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain. At the root of the id is a primitive energy to seek pleasure (usually of a sexual nature) called the libido. However, lest we become animals, we also have a counterweight in the superego. The superego, according to Freud, has a paternal authority that brings up feelings of guilt and a sensitivity toward consequences. The motivation to fulfill our wishes and biological drives is in a constant struggle with our nagging superego. A healthy person is able to navigate through this intrapsychic conflict with a healthy personality.

This brings us to the third question we ask of Freud; can the structure of one’s personality change over time? As stated above, Freud believed that childhood experiences with these conflicts mold the personality. Personality development is to be seen as psychosexual stages. Each stage presents the crossroads of a biological drive (id) and the learning of opposing social norms (superego). To successfully continue on to the next level one must learn to problem solve and cope with these frustrations in a healthy manner. This begins with the child’s first psychosexual conflict in the oral stage. Being the most primitive part of our personality, the id leads the child to live by the pleasure principle and demands to be fed whenever hungry. The next stage considers the child’s intrapsychic conflict with potty training in the anal stage. A child must then overcome his or her desire to sexually connect with the parent of the opposite sex in the phallic stage. The latent stage is a time of ‘latent’, or non-presenting, sexuality followed by the adult genital phase and accompanying obsession with the genitals. Our personality develops as we discover coping skills at each frustrating level. Along the way one may be frustrated and develop a fixation and neurosis while a healthy person will successfully negotiate between the pull of the id and superego.

The last question asks for an explanation of the differences between individuals according to the theory. Freud would argue that different people develop in differing environments and had different childhood experiences. An adult that was not breastfed as an infant may very well develop an oral fixation due to the unsatisfied desire. When a girl discovers that she is missing a penis, Freud states that she may become neurotic, develop a masculinity complex, or develop normally. This implies that Freud acknowledged that different people have different levels of resiliency given their circumstances.

I can only imagine if the Joker were to lie on Dr. Freud’s couch. The Joker is a pathological liar, with reactive attachment issues, scars he credits to either childhood abuse or self-mutilation (he contradicts himself in the movie) and presents with suicidal ideation. Let’s interpret the Joker’s personality under Freud’s psychoanalytic microscope. First we look at the structure of the Joker’s id, ego, and superego. Being a sociopath, he presents with a surgically precise id. He can masterfully calculate how he can steal the most money, kill the most people, and as he explains to the bed-ridden Harvey Dent, how he can “introduce [the most] chaos”. He is able to temporarily delay fulfilling the desire to kill in order to cause more anxiety in others and achieve an almost orgasmic thrill in seeing innocent people kill each other. However, I take a step backward to point out that his id is actually damaged. Thanatos is the “death instinct” that pulls us toward death while our Eros motivates us to preserve our lives. The Joker, I submit, has a very dimly lit Eros. As Batman’s motorcycle comes screaming towards him, the Joker actually walks towards him muttering things like “hit me!!” and “Do it! I want you to do it!”. Clearly self-preservation is one biological need the Joker lacks. But why? We may gain some insight by looking at the absence of his superego. Through out the movie he openly mocks society as phony and hypocritical. Sure, they’re all civilized when things go “according to plan”, says the Joker, but as soon as things go wrong, everyone panics and shows who they really are. Rules are arbitrary false values and principles and therefore have no hold on the Joker. Twice in the movie the Joker explains how he got his scars. In one account he growls that his father was an abusive drunk that asked his son “why so serious?” and proceeded to cut the Joker’s face. He said that he hated his father. When Freud says that the superego is based on the authority of the father, the Joker’s reactive attachment to his father would explain why he did not internalize societal norms. It seems as though from an early age the Joker let his id control his personality and with a broken ego he experiences a certain detachment from reality.

The second question is of motivation. What would motivate someone to kill innocent people without thinking twice? As Alfred explained to a confused Bruce Wayne, “some men just like to watch the world burn”. After some reflection, I submit that the Joker is out to prove a point. Throughout the movie he has an unquenchable contempt for social structure and norms as was mentioned above. After Batman leaves the Joker in an interrogation room with a police officer, the Joker enrages the guard by saying that when you push people to the brink and they face death, then you see who they really are. At that point, according to the Joker, they drop their phony façade and behave like the chaotic, selfish animals that we all are. I submit that his motivation is to conduct social experiments to prove himself correct- that at the core people are controlled by their Eros (while he is only controlled by his own delusion of grandiosity). He has two men fight to the death with one sharp stick between them. He gives two boatloads of people the detonator to bombs on the other ship. He tells Batman that if he [Batman] wants to catch him [the Joker], that he’s going to have to break his One Rule that was brought up at the end of the first movie—to not kill. In addition, Freud may also venture to explore other defense mechanisms such as possible projection of the Joker’s bubbling chaotic selfishness onto all men and women. He may also explore possible displacement of the Joker’s hatred of his own father onto all forms of authority.

The third question is about how the personality changes over time. Little is known about the Joker’s past. If Freud were to watch Dark Knight, I could see him pointing out the Joker’s constant twitching and licking of his lips as possible evidence of an oral fixation and would want to ask the Joker about his relationship with his mother. If we go ahead and believe that the Joker really did have and hate his abusive alcoholic father, then we would explore the intrapsychic conflict between the Joker and his father and as a result, the underdevelopment of a superego. In the second narration of the origins of his scars, the Joker tells Rachel that he once had a wife that was cut up by mobsters and that in an effort to make her feel better, he carves his own face and was devastated when she leaves him. If we believe this version of the story, then his anger from his father (who in this case was not the one who cut up his face, but perhaps still an abusive drunk) is compounded when he is rejected by his wife. Perhaps this was a cathartic experience that releases previously repressed hatred and it comes spilling out as he seeks revenge on mankind. With the death of Ledger, we’ll never know.

The fourth question asks why there are differences between the Joker and the rest of us. As was just discussed, the Joker had traumatic conflicts that he was unable to resolve in a health manner. Thus he developed neurosis and did not develop a superego… He became the psychopathic, mass murdering monster we have all come to love.