Slow Learner again. I find THIS very interesting. Young P on Freudianism

[Paul Mackin]

*https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#inbox/152ffbae2b3a20f8
<https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#inbox/152ffbae2b3a20f8>*


*Analyzing Norman: Mother Issues, With A Side Of Rage*

"I would probably work with his hatred of this mother and his rage at being
abandoned," Frank says. "And then I would work very intensively with how
every single session, at the end of each session, he would probably feel
like killing me — because he can't stand to have anybody turn their back on
him."

Near the end of *Psycho,* a psychiatrist explains what happened to Norman:
that he had murdered his mother and her lover years earlier, after feeling
abandoned by her. That, over the years, his personality had become shared
with hers. That the mother half would kill those who threatened to come
between mother and son — and that now Mother had taken over Norman's mind
completely, and probably forever.

Frank thinks the screenwriter and director portrayed Norman's paranoid
schizophrenic condition accurately — and that, considering the state of
psychiatry almost 50 years ago, the therapist in the film is correct in his
analysis.

With one exception, that is: Frank doesn't think Norman's condition has to
be permanent.

"He's an interesting guy who essentially substitutes the pain of loss and
grieving with becoming the other person. So one way to manage loss is you
totally take on the characteristics and the behavior of the person who is
dead.

"But I think that if you got him on an analytic couch, you would begin to
see breakthroughs between those two partial people. I don't think he is
irretrievably lost, the way it was presented."

*Psycho*'s brilliant final scene shows Norman huddled alone, locked in a
room at the county courthouse. His mind has been completely taken over by
Mother, and he speaks to himself in her creepy voice, saying that she would
never harm anyone, that she wouldn't even harm the fly that is buzzing on
her hand.

Norman/Mother then smiles, looks up at the camera — and for just the merest
instant, the mummified skull of Mother is superimposed on Norman's face.

Then that fades into a shot of Marion Crane's car being dredged from the
swamp behind the Bates Motel.

Critics have found Norman Bates' legacy in brainy, charming, psychotic
killers like Hannibal Lecter in *Silence of the Lambs.* Someone we'd maybe
like to hang out with — except for the killing part.

But it's just that killing part, says Justin Frank, that makes us love
Norman Bates, at least up there on the movie screen.

"People are excited by people who don't just yell, 'Kill the umpire!' but
actually do kill the umpire. And I think there's something about that that
makes him enduring also."





On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 12:27 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> No aesthetic argument from me but I will say: I experienced, because
> Psycho went so wide in its appeal, many less educated, lower working class
> folks (and relatives) who would use that scene in talking about the
> movie--explaining Norman. To them, it made him 'understandable', not simply
> inexplicably "crazy' or just a weird murderer. A horror movie next door, so
> to speak.
> When I was coming of age
> as freudianism was moving on culturally (In America), but still strong. I,
> personally, carried the freudianism I tried to pick up young around in my
> head explanatorily, narrowly, for a long time, fyi.
> I was led to Life Against Death thereby and Fromm, Marcuse, Reiff, Norman
> Holland as one of my lit crit explainers (due to an earnest prof, female;
> boy has he disappeared as a critic worth reading) and others simultaneously
> with learning how to try to read the best writers of my time.
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 10:17 AM, kelber at mindspring.com <
> kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>> Wow, I didn't know about the story behind that utterly crappy shrink
>> scene in Psycho. Makes one wish that Freud had ended up in The Bates Motel
>> pond.
>>
>> Laura
>>
>> *Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID*
>>
>>
>> Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>  MK> Freud was the mother's milk of a certain social and esp
>> intellectual class for postwar America
>> and, of course, TRP would know and have absorbed that
>>
>> ​It's my guess that the fading context of Freud and of Pavlov -> Watson
>> behaviorism is already, and will be more in the future, one of the most
>> dated aspects of GR. That is, it will be something that ambitious readers
>> will have to "study up" as they do much of Bloom's 1904-vintage
>> pop-intellectual mental furniture in Ulysses, or as we do all of Dante's
>> late-medieval theo-psychology .
>>
>> I thought again of this recently while bingeing on Hitchcock, especially
>> re-watching 'Spellbound' and 'Psycho.' In the penultimate scene of the
>> latter -- otherwise a superbly taut, economical narrative --, a
>> psychiatrist who has just interviewed Norman Bates in his cell comes into
>> the sheriff's office and delivers a painfully long, pedantic, flat-footed
>> explanation of Bates' mental state and history (almost all of which we
>> could infer for ourselves). For decades I'd wondered how Hitchcock could
>> have made that mistake. This time I watched a 1997 "making of Psycho"
>> extra, incorporating an interview with screenwriter Joe Stefano. He had
>> been in psychoanalysis himself at the time of writing the script, and said
>> that Hitchcock had initially opposed that scene as a "hat-grabber" -- i.e.,
>> the audience would start getting ready to leave. Thd Master should have
>> stuck to his guns on that.
>>
>> At least Pynchon didn't succumb with Tyrone to the trope that annoys me
>> most in a lot of the strongly Freud-influenced storytelling of the
>> 1930s-1960s: that explicitly remembering and "talking out" an early trauma
>> (Mommy did X, Daddy didn't do Y, I witnessed and repressed Z) produces an
>> irreversible, even rapid "let the sunshine in" breakthrough to psychic
>> health. Some of that cropped up in the Satanic-child-abuse mania c. 1990,
>> and you can still see traces of it in various "recovery" psychologies
>> today.
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 7:49 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Flange is not as concerned with the greedy cost of his analysis with
>>> Diaz
>>> "than with the dim suspicion he was somehow being cheated: it may have
>>> been that he considered himself a legitimate child of his generation, and,
>>> Freud having been mother's milk for
>>> that generation, he felt he was learning nothing new."
>>>
>>> Freud was the mother's milk of a certain social and esp intellectual
>>> class for postwar America
>>> and, of course, TRP would know and have absorbed that. And learned its
>>> attitude to
>>> self-understanding and its psychic discoveries.
>>>  And soon would want to go much beyond that 'nothing newness' by
>>> reading and being influenced deeply by Life Against Death, Brown's
>>> Beyond Freudianism
>>> to the max as seen in GR.
>>>
>>> GR p. 411: follows seance words:
>>> ...[They] pick up the reflexes of Intent to Gawk; self-criticism is an
>>> amazing technique, it shouldn't work but it does"..
>>> ...
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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