Psycho

      Motherhood is a crucial component to the healthy development of a child.  The way a mother praises and encourages, or belittles and shames becomes the way a child views themselves as they grow up. As they go through the various stages of development, of which psychical and psychological development go hand in hand, their parents, but especially their mother as they most often are the parent around most often, play a crucial part in how much development actually occurs. Freud's 5 stages of development are an accurate model for the analyzation of Norman and his serial killer tendencies. The concepts of motherhood, vouyerism, and psychosexual development are explored and analyzed in Robert Bloch's Psycho. 

 

      Norman Bates has a serious obsession with his mother, who constantly pervades his mind with her belittling and shaming. This and her insistence of the evil outside world combines into Norman's inability to leave his mother, for he cannot leave to live in a world full of evil and has become entirely dependent on her. Her raising of him left him seriously impaired for the real world, and so he is stuck in the stages of psychosexual development: the phallic stage, never able to become a fully developed individual. 

 

     Norman's idolization of his mother come from this stage, where his development has been hindered by his mother's belittling and over-protectiveness. Norman competes to be the only one in her life and to gain her affection, which he can never quite achieve. His murder of his mother's "male friend" and his mother shows this competitiveness, where if he cannot have her, no one can. His consequential guilt of killing his mother is proof of this idolization and dependence she left him with. He cannot go into the real world because of his dependence and deep feelings of inadequacy, and his mother's obsession with the evil of the world, particularly with women and their sexuality, transfers to Norman, whose thoughts are constantly turned to this whenever he encounters guests, particularly women. 

     

      Norman's vouyeristic tendencies, such as looking through his peephole into the next room's bathroom to watch his guest's undress, unknowingly under surveillance, can also be related back to the phallic stage of psychosexual development. His interest in the sexuality and differences of male and females relate to this stage, where he is still underdeveloped. His remaining virginity, at the uncommon age of 40, also points to this underdevelopment. He does not feel adequate enough to attempt to act on his sexual urges for the opposite sex, so he remains behind the peephole, satisfying his curiosity, but not his urges. The manifestation of this urge is his stabbing of Mary, the female victim whom he had just previously watched undress. His sexual urges have just been heightened, aggravated by a woman of the "evil world", and now he must act on this urge and this impression. His killing of her satisfies his disgust with her evilness, and the stabbing, the penetration of knife through the skin, satisfies his sexual phallic urges. 

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    Norman's mother may also present another underdeveloped psychosexual stage: the anal stage. Her rigid, obsessive and controlling personality is a model for the anal-retentive personality, which develops at the anal stage. Also, her obsession with the word "disgusting" to describe Norman hints at the anal stage. Too strict parents are believed to be the deciding factor of the overextended development of the anal stage, so perhaps Norman's mother had her own psychologically-hindering parents. This personality development incapacitates his mother's ability to progress through the psychosexual stages, and therefore her psychological heritage is passed down to Norman, eventually creating an abomination of society, the serial killer.