AUSTIN, TEX.—What’s the matter with Batman?

Not as much as you might think, actually — at least in the learned opinion of Stanford, Calif., clinical psychologist and author Robin S. Rosenberg.

Rosenberg, who balances her more “serious” work on textbooks such as Abnormal Psychology with occasional, fun (if scholastically sound) forays into the minds of comic-book vigilantes like Our Superheroes, Ourselves, was a popular draw at the South by Southwest Interactive conference on Monday morning with a brief, good-humoured lecture titled after another recent book, What’s the Matter with Batman? An Unauthorized Clinical Look Under the Mask of the Caped Crusader.

The goal of the book and Rosenberg’s talk was to assess whether or not Batman’s decidedly abnormal habits of dressing up like a bat and constantly putting himself in harm’s way in the fight against crime constitute evidence of “a diagnosable mental disorder.”

First up: “dissociative identity disorder,” i.e. what they used to call “multiple-personality disorder.” It could be argued Batman is a likely candidate for this illness, given that he leads separate lives as both Bruce Wayne and the Caped Crusader every day of his life. Rosenberg, however, disagrees since, among other things, Batman/Wayne is fully cognizant of and in control of his shifts between alter egos.

“They’re not actual personality states. They’re acts,” she said. “They’re not distinct personalities that come to the fore unbidden.”

Next up: post-traumatic stress disorder. Again, Batman seems ripe for a case of PTSD since his whole superhero existence was borne of witnessing his parents’ bloody murder as a child and the very nature of his chosen vocation — chasing down and clashing violently with myriad evil supervillains — puts him in situations that would leave most of us in therapy for years. As Rosenberg put it: “Night after night, he just keeps having traumatic experiences.”

Nevertheless, Batman/Wayne doesn’t suffer from the completely “impaired functioning” that leaves genuine PTSD sufferers emotionally numb, beset by horrific flashbacks, mentally agitated and unable to cope with their daily lives for a month or more at a time. He might have his issues, but “Batman is never out of commission that long,” maintains Rosenberg.

Diagnosis? No post-traumatic stress disorder, either.

Ultimately, the message of Rosenberg’s lecture was one that should be somewhat comforting to the freaks, geeks and rock ’n’ rollers in Austin for South by Southwest this week.

“People can be odd, be weird and be quirky and not have a mental disorder. They can be abnormal without being different than normal,” she said, adding that “having issues” is “part of the range of normal. In a culture that searches for pathology, this often gets lost.”

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