"Madness is the emergency exit..."

So a few weeks ago I said I'd write about the mythos of the bat...

I LIED.

This week we're going to talk about everyone's favorite villain

That's right - The Joker.

The Joker's been around since Batman Issue 1 and has terrorized Gotham for what seems like decades (even though in the storyline, its only been like...20 years tops). He's insane, quick (in The Man Who Laughs by Ed Brubacker, Batman says that he's surprisingly quick and difficult to pin down), manipulative, intelligent...basically every negative quality in a criminal mastermind.

But the history of the character is an interesting one; one that, again, involves psychoanalysis. The Joker exhibits signs of Amnesia, which is a condition in which memory is lost in a patient due to an external factor. More specifically, we would say the Joker exhibits Dissociative Fugue.

In order to define Dissociative Fugue, let's take the example of the Joker.

In the popular graphic novel The Killing Joke, written by esteemed writer Alan Moore, we learn (or think we learn) the past life of the Joker. Originally a comedian, the Joker helps two criminals break into a chemical plant to get money for his pregnant wife. The job goes awry as the two criminals are killed by the police and the Joker falls into a vat of chemicals. The unnamed character emerges from the chemical plant and becomes The Joker. And so the history of the Joker is revealed...or so we think.

Towards the end of the comic, the Joker barricades himself in a house of mirrors and reveals to Batman that he cannot remember his past. The Joker says, "Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another...If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!" Thus, we learn that the Joker doesn't really remember his past life. The traumatic (and chemical-induced) event of that fateful night the Joker fell into a vat of chemicals was the point at which the old personality of the unnamed comedian became the Joker. When a patient cannot recount any memories before a certain point, and then creates a new identity from that point on, it is called Dissociative Fugue, a subcategory of amnesia.

However, a Fugue does not last a lifetime; usually the old identity of a Dissociative Fugue can be recalled in days, or months. That is, they can be recalled through therapy. Due to this fact (and the fact that chemicals were involved in the Joker's creation), we could say the Joker would be diagnosed with an extreme form of Dissociative Fugue (which could border on Dissociative Identity Disorder). And really, one can blame everything on chemicals (Scarecrow, Two-Face, Clayface...etc. etc.).

But allow me to disregard the chemicals for one moment and examine the psychological trauma that the Joker experienced right before his creation. His pregnant wife had been killed, the police killed two men in front of him, and he was about to be captured by a giant bat that breaks the bones of criminals. That alone could account for amnesia occurring in a broken mind.

This article was mostly about amnesia. Next, we'll talk about what it means to be criminally insane.