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

[Paul Mackin]

Maybe, enduring [as well as] also [endearing]



On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 4:30 PM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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