Batman's not psychotic! He can distinguish between reality and delusion. He's just fucked up.

He can distinguish between reality and delusion.

He dresses up as a bat and swoops through Gotham. You're going to need to argue your case more strongly.

amych -- tag, you're it. Or "tag, your fic!" perhaps.

Dude, your ur-Batman is not the ur-Batman of all the cool kids.

Some might say, he's driven.

Batman's not psychotic! He can distinguish between reality and delusion. He's just fucked up.

I just read this to chatty!co-worker, and we had a brief debate on "Batman: Repressed Homosexual Tendencies or Not?" (I say not, BTW, which is just my perception of him; to be fair, I don't think of him as a sexual being at all, Selina notwithstanding.) That conversation led into Robin/Huntress, which I said was Nightwing/Huntress, and Chatty said that Nightwing only liked Huntress because her costume looks so much like Batman's.

To which I pointed out that Nightwing is an indiscriminate man-ho.

Nah. Nightwing is a man-ho, but it's very clear in the TPB that both Huntress and Nightwing are working out their Batman issues by sleeping with each other.

And another vote for Bruce knowing the diff between reality and delusion, here. What makes him a hero is he knows that he'll never defeat evil, but he fights anyway. (There's a reason there were all those Bat-references in S1 Angel, after all.)

Psychosis:

any of several major mental illnesses that can cause delusions, hallucinations, serious defects in judgment and insight, defects in the thinking process, and the inability to objectively evaluate reality.

I'm still good with thinking of Batman as psychotic, myself.

Also? In re Nightwing? When he and Babs break up, one of the things she bitches him out for is the way he continually flirts with any chick in a costume, even the evil ones, even right in front of her, and goes all "whu?" when one of them macks on him (see, e.g., the Tarantula attack that had just happened in that issue). But it occurs to me that if your primary model of male/female interactions is "Bruce Wayne, millionaire playboy" and the Batman/Catwoman dynamic, you probably mostly do flirt without even realizing that most people don't act like that all the time.

He dresses up as a bat and swoops through Gotham. You're going to need to argue your case more strongly.

Was it Chuck Dixon that said Bats was stuck in his childhood trauma? That putting on a suit so you are scarier than the bad guys is a child's solution to having the bad guys kill your parents. The thing that's impressive about Batman is that he had the will to actually carry out that solution, and actually did become scarier, and is effective at what he does. What's fucked up about him is that he holds onto that original trauma without ever moving past it. It's like a hard knot that will never loosen, that will always define him.

He's got some kind of personality disorder (probably more than one) - but he's not psychotic.

any of several major mental illnesses that can cause delusions, hallucinations, serious defects in judgment and insight, defects in the thinking process, and the inability to objectively evaluate reality.

I've always thought of him as being as far from that as it was possible to get.