#i'm in team 'lancelot has complex ptsd'

[liminalpsych]

okay but

let's expand on that. (ETA: ...too much expanding. whoops.)

Lancelot struggles with mental illness. That much is obvious from the stories. He is struck with "madness" multiple times and runs off into the woods, sometimes for years, and is "mad" for that whole time. (What does madness mean in this case? It's hard to tell, it was such a catch-all phrase for any kind of mental illness.) He has serious mood swings. He has very poor emotional regulation. He gets downright suicidal at times. (And homicidal, but that's being a knight of that era at times, I guess. Depending on which source material you're talking about.) He tends to battle-frenzy, berserker sort of behavior in the field. He is wholly devoted to Guinevere, to what I'd argue is a rather unhealthy degree, and his madness is the worst when he feels rejected by her.

There are only a few explanations for this.

One option is that he did have a loving mother and happy childhood, and therefore his behavior is due to something organic, neurochemical. There are limited options that fit his behavior:

Bipolar 1 with psychotic features. I doubt this one, I don't think it actually fits, but I haven't read enough source material yet to make a good analysis here. The deep depressive episodes do seem to show up in the stories. The episodic psychosis would fit with the episodes of "madness", though episodes of bipolar-related psychosis don't last for years. Still, we can't expect 12th century (and later) fiction writers to depict psychological conditions accurately, and maybe we can consider it an exaggeration or dramatization. I can see arguments for or against this one.

Other conditions that include psychosis. This is mostly conditions like schizophrenia, schizoaffective, schizophreniform, etc. Also substance-induced psychosis, so maybe we can theorize that whatever he was drugged with in the Elaine of Corbenic situation had long term psychosis as an effect. I think this is a stretch, though.

Autistic (and possibly ADHD). He was basically a changeling, after all, which may well have been the folkloric explanation for autistic people back in those days. There's a body of evidence correlating significantly higher adrenal/cortisol responses to stress and perhaps something impaired in the adrenal regulation part of the brain for autistic folks, which floods the brain and makes it hard to think clearly under stress. (I can link studies on this one, but the language in the research is, um. Not exactly neurodiversity affirming.) Autistic brains statistically have lower levels of serotonin as well. Not to mention the 60-80% of autistic folks who also have ADHD traits (or full blown ADHD), which comes with reduced norepinephrine and dopamine in the brain, and difficulty with emotional regulation and impulse control, plus dopamine-seeking (e.g. the intense relationship with Guinevere) and norepinephrine-seeking (adrenaline, high stress situations, etc). If there's an organic component and he truly did have a loving mother and no childhood trauma, this would be my best guess.

The other explanation is that he only appeared to have a loving mother and happy childhood. The guy has "attachment trauma" written all over his behavior. We can reconcile this a few ways:

Adoptee trauma. Even when adopted as infants, adoptees can experience the separation from their birth mother as traumatic. (This site has a decent discussion of the theories and research on this topic.) Even if the adoptive parents are relatively skillful and meet most of the child's needs, that separation from birth family and questions of identity and history and belonging all make a pretty big impact. Plus he was a cross-cultural adoption, a human adopted by a being of Faerie, which has its own layer of issues.

Perinatal trauma (trauma shortly after birth). Even if his trauma isn't about being adopted, the process of the circumstances of his adoption were pretty traumatic. Fleeing a fallen kingdom, mom tending to his mortally wounded father, and then a faerie enchantress spirits him away to another realm. That will still make an impact, even if the next several years are relatively happy ones.

Unhealthy family dynamics. The Lady of the Lake is either not human, or is a human who's very fae-like, depending on the story. Would she even know what care, time, energy, affection, attunement, and boundaries a human child needs to be provided with? Sure, she taught him, raised him, and gave him lots of extravagant gifts on his way out. I know plenty of people whose abusive parents give them extravagant gifts: as apologies (after abusive behavior), as control tactics (the gifts come with strings attached, obligations and expectations), as compensation (throw material gifts at the child because you aren't around to give them emotional love or social presence). And then he's just flung back into the human world while he's still comparatively young, with no accompaniment? Just "here's some trinkets so you don't die, have fun in the human realm that you've never really experienced before, good luck"? Yikes. That'd mess up anyone.

...now I want to write an exploration of Lancelot's childhood, what could have happened to make him into the mercurial adult he is in the literature.

lancelot is so funny because there is no reason for him to be like that he had a loving mother and a happy childhood like gawain i get u look at his youth and ur like wow yeah i get it. lancelot just woke up and literally chose violence