This article is analyzing Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, in particular its main character: Norman Bates and his connection to the Cold War. We have seen some sexual perversion and scenes of violence in Hitchcock’s previous movies, where he used Sigmund Freud’s concept of psychoanalysis to explain the acts committed. The characters had to make conscious their unconscious thoughts and motivations to released repressed emotions and experiences. This concept will be seen again in Psycho with Norman Bates’s character as he is psychologically damaged due to a rough upbringing and he has suffered from sexual and mental abuses. Filmed during the Cold War, this movie brings up questions about the American society and security at the time with …show more content…
Moreover, this article goes over the psychological impacts of the wars, especially World War II and the capability of psychoanalysis to identify mental disorders to potentially cure them. After the war, it was decided that the efficacy of those research could be applied to the civilians to help them seek treatment and emerge from that neurotic state. Then, the psychoanalytic community decided to define the term psychopath as an incomplete person, mentally unstable, expressing sexually disorganized behavior and capable of extreme violence. The psychopath was described as being emotionally unstable and answering to an “inside voice or authority”, listen it at times and trying to disregard it at others leading to sudden expressions of violence, theft or even crimes. The article explains how this psychopathic trait is developed in an individual from a young age due to the Oedipus complex. According to the Freudian Theory, it is the complex of emotions that aroused in a young child, typically around the age of four, by an unconscious sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex and wish to exclude the parent of the same