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

[Jochen Stremmel]

Shouldn't it be "endearing" at the end?

2016-02-20 22:18 GMT+01:00 Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at gmail.com>:

>
> *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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