The Joker Analysis

"Some men," remarks Michael Caine's wise old butler, Alfred, "just want to watch the world burn." This effectively serves as a succinct summary of Heath Ledger's Joker . There is no rhyme to him, no reason - just an appetite for anarchy, for chaos and for destruction that marks him out as the most terrifying screen psycho in years. The director Nolan attempted to portray Joker as a "psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy." Throughout the film, the Joker states his desire to upset social order through crime, and comes to define himself by his conflict with Batman. The Joker describes his with relationship with batman with phrases like “ you complete me,” wherein he believes that he would not be famous

He argues that the structures and conflict in the human mind shapes personality. Freud's psychoanalytic theory of personality implicated the structure of the mind, namely the id, ego, and superego, and how conflicts among these constituent parts are resolved in shaping human personality. Conflicts among these structures of the mind appear at each of Freud's five basic stages of psychosexual development: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. He claimed that successful navigation of these natural, internal conflicts will lead to mastery of each developmental stage, and ultimately, to fully-mature, adult personality. The character of Joker can be further analysed based on this

These values are instilled in the person primarily by parents, who teach which behaviours are appropriate or inappropriate in given situations. The superego thus represents a set of learned ideals. Freud eventually described the superego as having two components. One of which is the conscience. The Conscience is acquired through the use of punishment by the parents. In the case of the Joker, this sense of conscience was severely impaired. In a particular scene of the film, he describes his relationship with his father and about how he got the scars. As per the story, his father was a drinker who abused his mother and him, and caused the scars just to put a smile on his face, in a rather inappropriate situation. This disregard for normal human emotion may have resulted in the formation of a weak superego and a confused sense of right and wrong. His father was also far from being an ideal role model for the joker, which is essential to the development of a person. The joker throughout the film shows a complete disregard for the norms, and makes his own set of principles, parallel to what is accepted by society. Some of the famous techniques in psychoanalysis include Catharsis among Free association, hypnosis and Dream analysis. Freud conceptualized Catharsis in terms of ‘the emotional release of paralyzing affects