Blog #4: Parental Incest, The Oedipus Complex, & "Sex Is Evil" Tropes Within Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho

"Parental Incest, The Oedipus Complex, & 'Sex Is Evil' Tropes Within Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho"

Matthew Henninger

CCS 202: Blog Post #4

According to Sigmund Freud, the Oedipus Complex is a term in his theory of psychosexual stages of development to describe a boy's feelings of desire for his mother and jealously and anger towards his father. Essentially, this theory describes that a boy feels like he is in competition with his father for the love and compassion of his mother. The boy views his father as a rival and will do anything to gain the mother's companionship. Additionally, Freud claims that this theory occurs within the phallic stage of psychosexual development between the ages of three and five and will remain with the boy throughout his life unless it is properly resolved. The Oedipus Complex fits nicely within the Parental Incest trope, where there is a sexual repression and/or relationship between a parent and their child. When this trope is showcased within the media, it's usually used to highlight the specific psychological issues that a character has, particularly if it's featured in the backstory of (most commonly) a psychopath (E.g., Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho). Coherently, in mother-son incestuous relationships, the mother either loves her son in all of the wrong ways or there tends to be more focus on who in this relationships is the aggressor, the mother or the son. This aspect of the trope is often played humorously within a film, where the son understandably freaks out due to the mother's advances (This can be correlated to Norman Bates's reaction to his 'mother' when he discovers that Marion has been murdered). 

Robin Wood enunciates this aspect of Norman Bates and his mother in his critical and theoretical analysis of Hitchcock's Psycho. Wood states that, as Norman fully consumes the identity of his mother at the conclusion of the film, he begins to "denounce all the positive side of his personality. 'Mother' is innocent: 'she' spares the fly crawling on Norman's hand: it is Norman who was the savage butcher" and, as a result, the audience witnesses the "irretrievable annihilation of a human being" (Wood, 149). I find Wood's argument to be completely valid in respect to the theories presented in the Oedipus Complex: the boy/son is willing to do anything in order to establish a close and intimate relationship with his mother. For Norman Bates, he accomplished this desire by wholeheartedly consuming the identity of his mother and, in that respect, he has connected with her on a spiritual, emotional, and psychological level, even when she is now deceased. 

A final affirmation Wood makes in his analysis is the sexual repression of Norman Bates and his interactions with former female protagonist, Marion (I say "former" as her murder signaled the rapid end of audience-character identification and leaves us scrounging for the next vulnerable character to latch on to). Wood claims that during the shower murder of Marion, what we see is "primarily a sexual act, a violent substitute for the rape that Norman dare not carry out" (Wood, 148). When reflecting upon this analysis and the film further, I find that this quote pertains to yet another trope that I have termed "Sex Is Evil". A character within this state believes that sex is inevitably evil, but can't escape their own sexuality and will most likely take out this repression on themselves, their partners, or both. Wood makes a clever statement by relating the violent murder of Marion to be a repressed emotional desire of Norman, who wants to engage in sexual intercourse with her. In order for Norman to maintain this ideology of the "good-boy", which could have been brought on by his mother, he must remain innocent, pure, and eliminate anything that could cause him to express his sexuality. This expression could, as a result, drive him further away from his mother, thus completely deferring from the Oedipal Complex that he has adopted. 

It is unequivocal that Norman develops such an intense psychopathology as he continues to struggle in this war between the internal-self (wanting to please his mother) versus the external-self (wanting to embody his sexuality and have intercourse with Marion). Wood carries his argumentative analysis of Psycho by helping the audience and his readers accept "Norman Bates as a potential extension of ourselves" (Wood, 148). This, in part, can explain why this movie is considered extremely horrific, even in today's modern, slasher film ideological society. We can relate to Norman Bates; we too have the desire to embrace our sexuality without adhering to the constraints thrust upon us by our parents. However, we fear of being exonerated by them and will therefore do anything to eradicate this sexual desire. 

Works Cited

Wood, Robin. "Psycho" Hitchcock's Films Revisited. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. 142-151. Print.