Essay: Psycho – Hitchcock

Psycho in my opinion is one of Hitchcock’s greatest works. It alludes to a greater psychotic meaning, while grounding the audience in a now-familiar horror plot dynamic. You could easily claim that Psycho, more than any Hitchcock film, is the movie that changed the movies that followed — that it broke down, and reconfigured, popular storytelling by shifting it from a form in which lives were orderly and cohesive, bound by the symmetrical conflicts associated with classic Hollywood storytelling.
To Hitchcock, Psycho was the film that jolted Americans out of their post-war innocence. It helped usher in the 1960s as the decade of social upheaval. In this decade, what makes Psycho so unique is the plot devices it utilizes. Psycho was the first film to feature a false protagonist — a character who is seemingly the central figure of a story until they are moved out of the spotlight. The idea of a “False protagonist” had previously been featured in literature — an example I found was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World — however, this was the first time that the technique was used on screen. Neither of the two main characters is invested as subject during the progression of the investigation. Aside from the analytical approach from the psychiatrist, the truth of the plot is mixed into the stories of Arbogast, Sam, and Lila. Their hypotheses are not far from the real truth that is presented for the audience to digest. You have in the first third of the film, the story of Marion. A woman, tangled amongst a relationship with a troubled marriage, is a character who appears to be our story’s protagonist. In this reason, I believe that like Norman Bates himself, the film Psycho is entirely different than it appears to be at first glance. In its structure and its overall mood and tone, Psycho turns out to mirror the identity of Norman Bates.
Norman Bates like many only-children crave the attention they so desperately desired. Hitchcock was inspired by Robert Bloch’s 1959 book, Psycho, Bloch was initially inspired by the real-life story of Ed Gein, a psychotic murderer, grave robber, and body snatcher who lived a “double life”. Just like Norman Bates, Ed Gein had a complicated relationship with his mother, loving her while reportedly at the same time being scared of her possessive and manipulative personality. We can further try to analyze Norman’s behavior by using Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality. In Freud’s theory of Infantile Sexuality, Freud explains that a child has sexual instincts that are present in childhood and later are repressed. According to Freud’s theory, a child experiences Hysterical amnesia which is the repression of infantile sexuality. A “normal” childhood would be for everyone to repress these sexual feelings towards one’s own parents and out put it into other things or people. From evidence that the film alludes to Norman’s childhood, you can deduce that he never repressed these sexual instincts as a child. Since Norman was repressed, he had nothing else to output these sexual instincts. Norman was trapped with his mother and developed an abnormal relationship with her. Norman was never “properly” socialized with others and he developed a — much thanks to my friend, who is taking Social Psychology 101 for this connection— Oedipus complex.