Psycho
Robert Bloch
The man next door, with no bond left but a dead mother.
Social controlBloch’s Norman is a middle-aged bachelor who drinks, lives in isolation by the highway and keeps books on the occult and abnormal psychology in his bedroom. Bloch said he wrote with the notion that the man next door could be a monster nobody suspected, even in a gossipy small town. The real Ed Gein case came to light when the novel was nearly finished. Hirschi’s social control theory reads him well: a man with no bond to anyone except his dead mother.
Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock · Anthony Perkins
A shy, likeable young man, and a psychiatrist who explains everything.
Criminological psychoanalysisHitchcock makes Norman younger, shy and likeable. At the end a psychiatrist explains the case: he killed his mother and her lover out of jealousy, preserved her corpse and developed a personality that is the mother. It is textbook psychoanalysis, as KRIMINIS reads it: a sick superego given a voice that punishes every desire. But it is this version that presents his disorder as the cause of the crime; today that explanation is considered simplistic and stigmatising, because the vast majority of people with a mental disorder are not violent.
Bates Motel
Carlton Cuse, Kerry Ehrin y Anthony Cipriano · Freddie Highmore
The story of a bond between mother and son that leaves no air.
AttachmentThis contemporary prequel, broadcast on A&E from 2013 to 2017, follows Norman’s adolescence with his mother, Norma (Vera Farmiga), in the town of White Pine Bay. Its core is their relationship: an absolute trust that turns into a smothering, taboo bond, while Norman’s blackouts grow worse. Bowlby’s attachment theory provides the key: the first bond shapes how we love and trust later on. The series presents those blackouts as the symptom of a disorder; the direct line it draws from disorder to crime is fictional licence.
The 1959 novel portrays an isolated man nobody notices; the 1960 film explains him in the Freudian vocabulary that dominated the psychiatry of its day; the 2013 series focuses on the bond between mother and son in adolescence. The focus shifts from diagnosis to relationship, and the villain becomes more human along the way.
The archive reads them with Psychoanalytic criminology · Read the case file →
Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki · en.wikipedia.org/wiki · en.wikipedia.org/wiki. All the villains with versions.