We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes: Alfred Hitchcock, American Psychoanalysis, and the Construction of the Cold War Psychopath

Robert Genter
Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 40, Number 2, 2010, pp. 133-162 (Article)
Published by University of Toronto Press

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We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes: Alfred Hitchcock, American Psychoanalysis, and the Construction of the Cold War Psychopath
Robert Genter

Abstract: This article explores the image of the psychopath in Alfred Hitchcocks 1960 lm Psycho. The famed directors portrayal of a psychologically damaged young man connected with a much larger discussion over political and sexual deviance in the early Cold War, a discussion that cantered on the image of the psychopath as the dominant threat to national security and that played upon normative assumptions about adolescent development and mother-son relations. Keywords: psychopath, Alfred Hitchcock, authoritarianism, deviance, sexuality, criminality, psychoanalysis sent article jette un coup dil sur limage du psychopathe sume : Le pre Re sentation par le ce le ` bre du lm Psycho (1960) dAlfred Hitchcock. La repre directeur dun jeune homme ayant subi des dommages psychologiques, e a ` une discussion beaucoup plus e largie sur la de viance politique raccorde but de la guerre froide, une discussion centre e sur limage et sexuelle au de curite nationale du psychopathe comme une menace dominante pour la se sur les hypothe ` ses normatives au sujet du de veloppement de et qui a joue ` re-ls. ladolescent et des relations me viance, s : psychopathe, Alfred Hitchcock, autoritarisme, de Mots cle , criminalite , psychanalyse sexualite

In April 1959, Peggy Robertson, production assistant to Alfred Hitchcock passed along to the famous director, a New York Times book review by Anthony Boucher of a new crime novel, Psycho,
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by renowned horror writer Robert Bloch. Bouchers enthusiastic review of what he referred to as an icily terrifying yet believable history of mental illness (Boucher 25) encouraged Hitchcock to instruct his agent at MCA to purchase the screen rights. Blochs horric tale of a forty-year-old motel keeper, who had, years prior to the events of the novel, murdered his mother and then internalized her personality to relieve his guilt and who then directed his murderous rage onto helpless motel occupants, was the perfect vehicle for Hitchcocks lifelong interest in murder, deviant sexuality, and psychopathology. In a number of lms, including Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock had already linked perversion and criminal behaviour and had used the language of psychoanalysis as an explanatory tool. But Psycho, with its grizzly shower scene, seemed too audacious for Hitchcocks conservative studio producers at Paramount.1 Consequently, in order to get the lm made, the famed director had to scale back his normal production costs and dispense with his usual, well-paid lm stars. Although he received favourable coverage from the New York Times during the shooting of his lm, Hitchcock was mostly lambasted by critics for failing to reach the high standard he had previously set (Coe 20). Echoing the sentiments of many, New York Times lm critic Bosley Crowther called Hitchcocks lm old-fashioned melodramatics (37). But Psycho struck a chord with audiences nonetheless. With $9.5 million in ticket sales, Hitchcocks lm ranked behind only Ben-Hur in terms of domestic gross (Rebello 164). In part, the success of the lm stemmed from Hitchcocks famous publicity stunts. He lmed a highly successful trailer that featured the director giving a tongue-in-cheek tour of the Bates motel. Hitchcock also demanded that theatre owners refuse to seat ticket buyers after the start of the feature, preserving an air of mystery around the lm. But more importantly, Hitchcocks lm spoke to a much larger social anxiety. As one audience member explains in a letter to the New York Times in which she castigates critics like Crowther for failing to recognize the importance of the lm, to deny that human beings have certain animal-like instincts and sexual impulses, thereby creating certain disturbances and problems in our very sophisticated civilization, is to irt with a disaster far greater than an atomic war (Balin). Indeed, Hitchcocks portrayal of a psychologically damaged, sexually and morally confused young man connected with a much larger discussion, in the early Cold War, of political and sexual

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deviance, a discussion that centred on the image of the psychopath as the dominant threat to American security. In so doing, the lm played upon normative assumptions concerning adolescent development, family structures, mother son relations, and sexual practices, conservative assumptions that reected not merely Hitchcocks own personal anxieties but also larger cultural ones. In fact, Psycho was just the most visible document to issue a warning about the deviant behaviour lurking within each individual. By 1960, policy makers had already alerted the public to the dangers mental illness posed to the body politic. Under the auspices of the National Mental Health Study Act of 1955, the US Congress, for instance, established the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health, a research organization designed to collect nationwide data on the psycho-therapeutic profession. One of the eleven monographs produced by the Commission was a study that polled 2,460 Americans about their psychological well-being. Published the same year that Hitchcock released his feature, Americans View Their Mental Health revealed that, despite differences in class position or educational level, most Americans felt a persistent undercurrent of isolation and a sense of helplessness in the face of events (Gurin, Veroff, and Field xiii). In general effect, the authors declare, the Gurin Veroff Field monograph supports the community surveys showing a high prevalence of persons with various psychiatric or psychological illnesses or maladjustments (xxv). But the major concern for mental health professionals was not merely the neurotic tics of average citizens; the more immediate concern, as journalists who translated such research into the pages of Life, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies Home Journal explained, was with serious mental disease, that is, those grave illnesses, such as schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychoses, [and] paranoia (Davis 13), that left individuals disconnected from reality. More importantly, while many such illnesses had consequences only for the sick individual, those who were psychopathic personalities posed a threat to the American public. The mentally ill deserved sympathy and treatment, according to commentators; the psychopath needed incarceration and surveillance. Consequently, by the time Psycho premiered in 1960, the image of the psychopath had already inltrated the American imagination, an image that linked concerns over national security to lingering worries over political behaviour and deviant sexuality.

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The Problem of Mental Health in America In 1955, Newsweek declared that the U.S. is without a doubt the most psychologically oriented, or psychiatrically oriented nation in the world and noted that the almost compulsive search for mental health now goes on in the nations art, in its schools, in its pillows, even in its religion (The Mind 59). Americas Freud obsession, as one European commentator explained, was quite remarkable given the resistance, if not outright dismissal, Freud received almost fty years prior when he delivered a series of public lectures at Clark University in 1909 (Gorer 5). But the bullets of World War II quickly changed the professional status of psychoanalysis, if not psychology, in the United States as a whole. Recognizing that the treatment of veterans with psychiatric disabilities from the previous war had cost approximately one billion dollars, governmental ofcials attached psychiatrists to military divisions to advise in the early detection of neuropsychiatric patients. As the army distributed more than 9 million copies of Psychology for the Fighting Man and began training thousands of medical ofcers in the rudiments of psychology, the available number of psychiatrists tried to handle a growing case load. The Neuropsychiatry Consultants Division of the Surgeon Generals Ofce, for example, reported that, between January 1942 and June 1945, there were approximately 1 million hospital admissions from the army for neuropsychiatric disorders (Appel 433). By the wars end, psychologists had served in seven theatres, nine service commands, ten armies, and hundreds of evacuation hospitals (Moskowitz 102). After the end of hostilities, the psychoanalytic profession vaulted into public discourse on this wave of enthusiasm. Those psychiatrists who had practised in wartime service noted that the high rate of draftees rejected for neuropsychiatric disorders demonstrated that mental illness was a serious health problem. For instance, air force psychiatrists Roy Grinker and John Spiegel argued that [their] experiences as military psychiatrists serving combat soldiers were perfect training for the understanding of the psychology and psychopathology of people under the stresses of ordinary civilian life (427). In 1946, William Menninger and a number of other members of the American Psychiatric Association formed the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, a pressure organization to encourage a more prominent role for psychiatrists in promoting mental health. As Menninger explained in the pages of the New York Times, Psychoanalysis has contributed enormously to the understanding of

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normal behaviour, and hence serves as the only logical basis for preventive psychiatry a valid mental hygiene (50). Federal ofcials who had witnessed the efcacy of psychoanalysis in promoting the war effort were more than willing to enlist the aid of psychiatrists in confronting similar problems in civilian life. Indeed, the signing of the National Mental Health Act in 1946 marked the ofcial beginning of the romance of American psychology (Herman). Promoted by psychiatrist Robert Felix, the director of the Division of Mental Hygiene of the US Public Health Services, and by Congressman J. Percy Priest and Senator Claude Pepper, the National Mental Health Act dramatically increased funding for research into the aetiology of mental disorders and created the National Institute of Mental Health to encourage growth in the number of practising psychiatrists. By the 1950s, psychoanalysis had reached what historian Nathan Hale refers to as its golden age in the United States (257). The most important task was to make individuals aware of the extent of psychological illness and to end the stigmatization attached to therapy. In 1946, for instance, Time magazine argued that about 8,000,000 U.S. citizens were neurotic or worse (For the Psyche 73), and nearly ten years later Newsweek placed the number at ten million (The Mind 61). In response, countless psychoanalysts, including Dr. George Stevenson of the National Association for Mental Health and Dr. Marie Nyswander of the National Addiction Research Project, appeared in the pages of national magazines to remake ideas about psychiatry (Nyswander 90). Countless features transformed the stoic, European analyst into a benevolent, native-born therapist, making treatment seem more ordinary. Newsweek, for instance, offered advice on how to select a psychologist and tried to answer worries about the nancial costs of longterm treatment (Talking Doctors). A number of Hollywood lms similarly portrayed psychoanalysis in a positive light, featuring sensitive therapists helping troubled characters nd balance [Lady in the Dark (1944), The Snake Pit (1948), and The Three Faces of Eve (1957)] or using psychoanalytic themes to explain the neurotic behaviour of characters [Rebel without a Cause (1955) and The Seven Year Itch (1955)]. Alfred Hitchcock himself offered sympathetic accounts of analytic treatment in Spellbound (1945) and The Wrong Man (1956). Even the most popular book in post-war America, Dr. Benjamin Spocks Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946), translated Freudian ideas into an accessible vernacular.

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National Character Studies and the Image of the Psychopath The ood of writings on psychoanalysis was not initiated simply by national concerns over the neurotic tics of average citizens. In large measure, interest in this old discipline was sparked by the myriad European analysts who sought refuge during the war. As historian Eli Zaretsky has noted, America became the unofcial capital of the psychoanalytic community in the 1940s, as famed theorists, such as Helen Deutsch, Heinz Hartmann, and Theodor Reik, helped to found institutes in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago (276). Scarred by witnessing European civilization collapse under fascism, these analysts also brought the pessimism of Freuds Civilization and Its Discontents to America, helping to alert their seemingly ve counterparts to the spectre of collectivist politics. As the na vocabulary of psychoanalysis seeped into every academic discourse, offering new analytic tools to sociologists and political scientists, these analysts interjected a larger concern with group psychology. Soon, American intellectuals, particularly those anthropologists associated with the culture and personality school, used psychoanalysis to dissect the character of those nations participating in the war. Works such as Margaret Meads And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942) and Ruth Benedicts The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946) treated someones character his or her behaviour, attitudes, moral direction, and so on as the product of the shared traits of a given society during the course of its development. The assumption guiding such works was that particular child-rearing practices reinforced particular psychological traits (oral, anal, or genital xations) that led to the formation of particular character types. After the war, books such as David Riesmans The Lonely Crowd and Geoffrey Gorers The American People: A Study in National Character used Freudian concepts to describe the American character, pointing to everything from the economic dislocations of the Great Depression to the spread of mass culture in order to explain deviant behaviour. Indeed, the psychoanalytic and sociological literature of the 1950s was littered with a host of character types the rebel, the juvenile delinquent, the homosexual, and so on character types that had supposedly been produced by certain distortions in psychological development. In the early Cold War, however, most studies of character typology focused on the personality make-up of those individuals who had fallen prey to totalitarian ideologies. Beginning with the ground-

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breaking work of political scientist Harold Lasswell, who, in a series of books including Psychopathology and Politics (1930), had argued that political beliefs were nothing more than the unconscious projection of personal turmoil onto the public sphere, American intellectuals, in works such as Gabriel Almonds The Appeals of Communism (1954) and Hadley Cantrils Politics of Despair (1958), dissected the psychological appeal of both communism and fascism. The most comprehensive post-war study of the irrational nature of modern man was The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a collaborative investigation commissioned by the American Jewish Committee and authored by Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford. Arguing that political deviance was not governed by rational calculations about economic inequalities, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality used the tools of psychoanalysis, including projective testing and depth psychology, to unearth the unconscious motivations of party members. According to them, the authoritarian personality exhibited a host of traits: a submissive attitude towards authority, an aggressive reaction to outsiders, and a lack of understanding of international events. Although these traits were not comprehensive of all the features of this personality pattern, they did, according to the books authors, form a more or less enduring structure in the person that renders him receptive to antidemocratic propaganda (Adorno et al. 228). Such receptivity was linked to the psychological weakness of the individual; in particular, the inability to balance the conicting demands that issued from internal and external forces. In order to understand the nature of this apparent ego weakness and unearth the associated character structure, the authors turned to the concept of the psychopathic personality. The concept of the psychopathic personality originated in the early nineteenth century with the work of British physician J.C. Prichard, who formulated the notion of moral insanity to refer to a wide range of mental deciencies that led to socially reprehensible behaviours.2 According to Prichards ndings, certain individuals lacked the natural feelings of respect and responsibility and therefore lacked the ability to restrain themselves from socially unacceptable behaviour, a broad categorization that encompassed almost all psychological maladies. Prichard, like those who followed him, argued that moral insanity had hereditary origins, giving rise in later years to the concept of constitutional psychopathic inferiority. In the early twentieth century, a number of psychiatrists in America including, Adolf Meyer and D.K. Henderson, rened the concept

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by studying criminals and delinquents, offering a range of physiological sources of the condition, including mental capacity, body type, neural structure, and brain disorders. But the most substantive research came during World War II, done in organized ways by psychiatrists working in veteran hospitals and in less ofcial ways by psychiatrists taking eld notes in the forward echelons of the war. As rejections at induction centres for instance, in Boston for those recruits diagnosed as psychopathic personalities reached 31 per cent and as the rate of psychiatric casualties labelled anti-social personalities (Arieff and Rotman 158) almost equalled those with neurotic disorders, studies of the psychopath littered psychoanalytic journals. The most famous research came from Benjamin Karpman, the chief therapist at St. Elizabeths Hospital, who, in a series of books in the 1940s, distinguished between the symptomatic type, who exhibited certain psychopathic characteristics generated by an underlying mental conict, and the idiopathic type, who exhibited no specic psychogenesis for his behaviour. Similarly, the Manual of Military Neuropsychiatry explained that research into psychopathology in army cadets had revealed that hereditary causes were less signicant than environmental impacts, research that was echoed by additional reports from the Cornell Medical College and the Rehabilitation Service of the New York State Hospital (see Malamud; Dunn; Heuser). After the war, the psychoanalytic community tried to provide a proper classication in terms of behaviour and symptoms for the psychopathic personality. As Benjamin Karpman notes, by the 1950s the term had become an over-cluttered wastebasket (524). In general, the psychopath was characterized by a stunted psychological development that produced sexually chaotic behaviour, including excessive masturbation and homosexuality, and by morally decient behaviour ranging from petty crimes to excessive violence. Equally important, the psychopath was distinguished from the ordinary criminal due to a lack of guilt and a failure to commit crimes for denable reasons. Despite generally undisturbed reasoning capabilities, the psychopath lacked any motivation for his actions. What made the psychopath difcult to diagnose and therefore to recognize in general was the mask of sanity (Cleckley) he or she wore. As Hervey Cleckley explains, in his 1941 book The Mask of Sanity, which set the framework for post-war discussions of the psychopath, We are dealing here not with a complete man at all but with something that suggests a subtly constructed reex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly

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(424). The psychopath was distinguished only by an underlying emotional instability that produced an oscillation between opposing behaviours. The psychopath was driven at times to overrule any internalized voice of authority and to yield to impulsive desires, while at other times slavishly following social rules and engaging in mechanical behaviour. Similarly, at times, the psychopath exhibited moments of sensitivity but, at other times, especially when confronted with anything disagreeable, he or she was prone to violent outbursts. Such an open-ended classication led to an almost immeasurable list of personality types deemed psychopathic; as psychiatrist Harry Lipton says, The group includes a heterogeneous lot of criminals, many emotionally unstable, inadequate personalities, some paranoid personalities, many alcoholics, drug addicts, pathological liars, swindlers, and sexual psychopaths (585). Described as affectively cold and paranoid but often sensitive and overly optimistic, the psychopath exhibited endlessly diverse symptoms, leading Walter Bromberg, the senior psychiatrist at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, to divide the personality into numerous sub-classications, including the paranoid psychopath, the aggressive psychopath, and the psychopathic swindler (53 4). Due to the extent of his emotional disturbances, the psychopath was, therefore, seen as the delinquent counterpart of the authoritarian personality, both exhibiting the combined traits of sadism and mental rigidity. As the authors of The Authoritarian Personality put it, Here go the hoodlums and rowdies, plug-uglies, torturers, and all those who do the dirty work of a fascist movement (763). In the absence of any organized movement to channel aggression and, therefore, of any externalized super-ego to which to adhere, the latent authoritarian personality lapsed into psychopathic behaviour, allowing destructive urges to come to the fore in an overt, non-rationalized way (763). Both personalities, however, were guided by pre-Oedipal urges, clinging to the omnipotence fantasy of very early infancy (763). Additional research conrmed the link between psychopathology and authoritarianism. A 1955 study conducted by psychologists at Vassar College of 225 female college students revealed that feelings of inadequacy leading to hostility to others was the dominant trait of both psychopaths and authoritarians (M. Freedman, Webster, and Sanford). A similar study of 712 rst-year students at San Diego State College demonstrated that certain psychopathological factors, such as compulsive behaviour and feelings of isolation, were present in

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the authoritarian syndrome ( Jensen). Less systematic accounts came from G.M. Gilbert, prison psychologist at the Nuremberg trials, in his 1950 book The Psychology of Dictatorship, and from Nathan Ackerman, one of the co-founders of the family therapy movement, in his 1958 book The Psychodynamics of Family Life (see also Bender). The individual most responsible for solidifying the connection between political deviance and psychopathology was Robert Lindner, the chief psychiatrist at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Lindners treatment of criminal personalities resulted in the publication of several case histories of his patients, including his successful analysis of a young criminal, Harold, as detailed in his 1944 book Rebel without a Cause. As both an armed robber and sexual deviant, Harold was, according to Lindner, a classic example of the criminal psychopath, that is, someone unable to delay the pleasures of gratication (2). His troubled childhood, especially his abusive relationship with his father, had left Harold with no paternal role model with which to identify. He consequently lacked the psychic agency necessary to check his latent aggression and this had contributed to his psychopathic behaviour. As Lindner explains, There seems to be little doubt that the special features of psychopathic behavior derive from a profound hatred of the father, analytically determined by way of the inadequate resolution of the Oedipus conict (7). The attendant characteristics of psychopaths lack of remorse, antisocial actions, aberrant behaviour, etc. were products of a crippled super-ego. Moreover, Harolds failed psychological growth had made him a prime candidate for afliation with totalitarian organizations. According to Lindner, The psychopath is not only a criminal; he is the embryonic Storm-Trooper (14). Unable to nd an outlet for his aggression and desperate for identication with a father gure, such a damaged personality easily fell prey to the allure of communism and fascism; indeed, in a series of case histories of political deviants collected in Must You Conform? and The Fifty-Minute Hour, Lindner detailed the psychopathic behaviour he saw as the essence of both these contentious political forms (Must 117). The Spread of Sexual Psychopath Laws In the most famous court case of the early Cold War, former State Department ofcial Alger Hiss, who was accused by the self-confessed ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers of procuring

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government documents for Soviet agents, charged that his accusers past membership in the Communist party demonstrated Chamberss mental instability. To prove his claim, Hiss enlisted the counsel of psychiatrist Carl Binger, who testied that Chambers was a classic example of a psychopathic personality, that is, someone who demonstrated the combined symptoms of paranoid thinking and abnormal emotionality (Conklin 1). Although Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950, the famed Hiss Chambers case only furthered the association between political and social deviance. Whispers about Chamberss odd sexual behaviours, including alleged homosexual encounters, helped to link the image of the psychopath to sexual deviance as well. Indeed, while European analysts initiated this discourse on the psychopath due to concerns with political behaviour, their fears were soon translated into a panic over sexual deviance. Beginning in the late 1940s, community leaders and mental health professionals warned about a dramatic increase in sex crimes, a nationwide panic that eventually led twenty-nine states to enact sexual psychopath laws ( Jenkins 34). In a 1948 Saturday Evening Post article, journalist David Wittels summarizes the perceived epidemic: No one knows or can even closely estimate how many such creatures there are, but at least tens of thousands of them are loose in this country today . . . They are not necessarily sex maniacs; they merely cannot control the dark impulses which are latent in all of us (31). Referred to in a litany of state legislative reports, including the Report of the Massachusetts Commission for the Investigation of the Prevalence of Sex Crimes (1948) and the Report of the Illinois Commission on Sex Offenders (1953), the sexual psychopath seemed to haunt the American landscape. Echoing an earlier concern in the 1930s, this national panic was triggered by a number of related social transformations. As several historians have recently argued, the explosion in state legislation about the sexual psychopath did not reect any actual increase in sex crimes (E. Freedman). Instead, such worries were related to a wider concern with the social and economic dislocations caused by World War II and to the anxieties created by the pressures of the early Cold War. In large measure, the fear of political subversion (either by trespassing Soviet agents or by morally decient Americans converted to the Communist cause) driving McCarthyism produced a corresponding fear of mental contagion a fear that a psychologically weak nation was vulnerable to noxious inuences. This concern over the sexual psychopath, which soon dovetailed with a concern over the homosexual menace, was generated by

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disruptions to traditional family arrangements, gender roles, and sexual practices during the Great Depression and World War II (DEmilio 65). The emergence in the 1940s of a substantial gay community in major urban areas combined, with growing evidence, such as Alfred Kinseys research on American sexual behaviours, of declining sexual mores created a larger panic about the vicissitudes of individual psychological development, a panic that tied in closely with the political scare of McCarthyism. Indeed, the authoritarian personality was always coded as sexually confused and was diagnosed as a product of the same psychological failings as those of sexual deviants. For instance, due to his unresolved castration anxiety, Harold, the criminal psychopath in Lindners Rebel Without a Cause, is depicted not only as a latent authoritarian but also as a latent homosexual, a nding echoed by most studies of political deviance. As Theodor Adorno, one of the authors of The Authoritarian Personality, explains, Totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together (Adorno, Minima 46). Equally important, rising female employment during and after the war, particularly for middle-class, married women, seemed to have put the stability of the family in question, prompting widespread pressure for a return to traditional domestic roles (Cuordileone). Womens increased participation in the public sphere was countered by widespread warnings about ubiquitous sexual dangers and criminal acts in American society. As Colliers magazine warned, Rape has increased 200 percent in the past twenty years, the most phenomenal increase of any major category of crime. The hoodlum rapist lurks in the foliage of a dark street waiting for a woman to walk home from the bus-stop (qtd. in Jenkins 53). In the midst of such sexual and political chaos, notions of the dangerous individual emerged a sexually and politically confused psychopath who, because of an inability to restrain his desires, posed a threat to the body politic. In response to this panic, state legislatures passed a litany of sexual psychopath laws in the 1950s. In most states, trial judges had the authority, in cases involving criminal offences, to adjourn or suspend proceedings if there was probable cause to believe the defendant suffered from a sexual pathology.3 Mandatory medical examination by the staff of the state public health department was then ordered. If psychiatrists determined the defendant was a sexual psychopath, he was then conned in a state mental hospital or the psychiatric division of a state penitentiary for an indeterminate duration. Under the doctrine of parens patriae, the power of guardianship over those deemed dangerous was bestowed on the

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state. States differed on the classication of such persons (the most common designations included the sexual psychopath, the sexually dangerous person, the mentally abnormal sex offender, and the psychopathic personality); states also differed on the list of compulsions that characterized a sexual pathology (common offences included rape, incest, homosexuality, transvestism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, and masturbation). The sexual psychopath was usually dened as any person with an existing mental disorder combined with a propensity to commit any type of sex crime. The 1958 Vermont statute, for instance, dened psychopathic personalities as persons who by a habitual course of misconduct in sexual matters have evidenced an utter lack of power to control their sexual impulses and who as a result are likely to attack or injure (qtd. in Swanson 234). State legislatures also recognized that additional information on the nature of sexual pathologies was necessary. In 1953, the state legislature in California funded a research program at the University of California in San Francisco to study the aetiology of sexual psychopathologies (Sex Psychopaths). Similar funds were bestowed upon New Yorks Sex Delinquency Research Project and New Jerseys Diagnostic Center, both of which analysed incarcerated sex offenders, as well as upon research projects in Nevada, Oregon, and Pennsylvania. Perceptions of a wave of sex crimes were furthered by an explosion of ctional and non-ctional portrayals of maniac killers and sexual perverts in books and lms throughout the 1940s and 1950s (see Jenkins, ch. 3). The concerns about foreign threats and political saboteurs that had characterized the earlier literature associated with the red menace were replaced by worries over internal threats from a dysfunctional body politic. Psychoanalytic case histories of actual psychopaths, such as Lindners Rebel without a Cause (1944), Fredric Werthams The Show of Violence (1949), and Curtis Boks Star Wormwood (1959), became bestsellers. Other case histories appeared in David Riesmans Faces in the Crowd (1952), Karpmans The Sexual Offender and His Offenses (1954), and David Abrahamsen, The Psychology of Crime (1960). As Life magazine explained in a 1957 series of articles on criminal behaviour,
The shocking, lurid march of crime in the United States is constantly recorded in a torrent of words and pictures. Yet few Americans have a clear picture of the staggering total effect of crime in the nation or of the problem that confronts every citizen in dealing with it. (Heiskell 46)

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Such concerns were soon translated into ctional accounts, stories that borrowed liberally from real criminal cases. In a 1950 New York Times article, Alfred Hitchcock himself signalled this shift, arguing that the suspense drama is being smoked out of its old haunts. I think that we must forget about espionage and rediscover more personal sorts of menace (Hitchcock, Master 123). Hollywood producers offered their own version of the psychopath in lms such as Knock on Any Door (1949), The Sniper (1952), and While the City Sleeps (1956), and Lindners case histories became the inspiration for both Nicholas Rays Rebel without a Cause (1955) and Hubert Cornelds Pressure Point (1962). Similar images of the psychopath were also offered in best-selling novels such as Charles Jacksons Outer Edges (1950), Jim Thompsons The Killer inside Me (1952), and William Marchs The Bad Seed (1954). This connection between crime ction and real crime drama is best exemplied in the work of Robert Bloch. Originally a crafter of supernatural tales in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft, Bloch rst experimented with the crime genre in his 1943 short story, Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper, a ctional portrayal of the most famous serial killer of all. Blochs successful 1947 novel The Scarf continued his exploration of the psychopathic personality, telling the tale of a budding novelist, Daniel Morley, whose high school seduction by his English teacher leaves him with a profound rage against women. Desperate to exorcize this memory, Morley spends his adult years murdering a series of lovers, using the maroon scarf with which his former teacher had once bound him. Blochs decision to use the rst-person narrative to explore the workings of his characters mind parallels the deciphering of the psychopathic mind in the litany of true case histories published concurrently. In fact, psychiatrist Wertham favourably reviewed Blochs novel in the pages of the American Journal of Psychotherapy, claiming that in terms of scientic accuracy and good writing in general, this is a book to be recommended (qtd. in Larson 69). Like many other novelists and screenwriters, Bloch readily borrowed from actual cases to construct his tales. For his most famous novel, Bloch turned to the shocking story of Ed Gein, a fty-one-year-old Wisconsin farmhand who was arrested in 1957 for the murder of two local women. When authorities searched his home, they discovered the severed remains of countless other bodies exhumed from a local cemetery ten skins of human heads, neatly separated from the skull; assorted pieces of human skin, some between the pages of magazines, some made into small belts, some used to upholster

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seats; [and] a box of noses (Portrait 39). Geins house of horrors, according to Life magazine, was the most macabre of horror stories, one that gave Americans everywhere a grim awareness that what had happened in an obscure Wisconsin town might have happened anywhere (House 25). As tales of his odd behaviour unfolded in newspapers from his pathological relationship with his dead mother, whose bedroom remained completely untouched, to his fashioning of a vest made from female esh he often donned late at night Gein, who was committed to the Wisconsin State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, became a symbol of the murder spree [dotting] the pages of crime annals in the U.S. (Murder 3). Bloch was aware that case histories of deviants such as Gein had captured the national imagination and, after reading accounts of the Wisconsin mans crimes, quickly transformed his story into the 1959 novel Psycho. In so doing, Bloch retraced a decade-long discussion about the psychopath from the psychoanalytic understanding of the aetiology of psychopathology to the assumed link between political and sexual deviance. Indeed, Bloch argued that his story was inspired not by Gein himself but by the murders he had committed. According to Bloch, he, in fact, did not know any details of Geins life when writing Psycho and only realized afterwards that Gein, like Norman Bates, was schizoid, that he had a mother xation, that he had lost his mother . . . and that he was a transvestite (Bloch, Companion 69). But Bloch admitted that he was familiar with the literature on the psychopathology of mass murder and that his story closely followed such examples. Intrigued by the notion that a small-town community was unaware of Geins activities, Bloch turned the farmhand into a fat, middleaged hotel proprietor (Bloch, Psycho 176) who, after having jealously murdered his mother, relieves his guilt by internalizing her personality and then directing his rage masochistically upon himself and sadistically upon motel guests such as young Mary Crane. As depicted by Bloch, Norman Bates is a compendium of the traits used by psychiatrists to diagnose the psychopath. Bates is an alcoholic prone to fall into drunken stupors, a misogynist whose anger stems from his sexual impotence, and a transvestite who is addicted to pornography. Indeed, Bates is a murderer who is neither woman nor man (Bloch, Once 229). Bates is also overly moralistic in his attitudes toward sex but driven to perversions such as voyeurism, excessive masturbation, and possibly homosexuality, a condition that was assumed to reveal a crippled ego

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simultaneously dominated by an overly harsh conscience and by a ood of perverse desires. Like the psychopathic personality described in Cleckleys The Mask of Sanity, Bates is less an actual human being than a constructed automaton, someone who is, as Bloch says, able to pretend sanity (Psycho 217). Similarly, like the authoritarian personality whose inability to understand the outside world led to a reliance on superstition, Bates is driven by a belief in mystical forces and the occult. Paranoid and often overcome by sadistic impulses but also meticulous in cleaning up the remains of his victims, Bates exhibits traits that align him with the distorted personality that had plunged Europe into turmoil. As Bloch puts it, Bates is given to perversions in the time-honored tradition of the Nazi death camps (qtd. in Rebello 13). In this sense, Bates became the exemplar of the political and sexual deviant depicted by the psychoanalytic community, in the pages of national newspapers, and within the entertainment industry. As Bloch himself argues, Psycho worked because the story was right for the time (Companion 68). Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho Hitchcock was well aware that his translation of Blochs novel followed this trend. Consequently, he insisted that his version of Psycho was not a case history told in a documentary manner like the litany of psychoanalytic tales littering bookshelves (Hitchcock, On Style 294). But the changes he made to Blochs narrative belie his insistence that he is uninterested in exploring the causes of deviance. In particular, Hitchcock foregrounds the psychiatric evaluation of Norman at the end of the lm, choosing to have a psychiatrist present his ndings through an extended monologue to a group of passive listeners instead of having Sam, the dead heroines boyfriend, provide the translation, as Bloch does in his novel. Hitchcock recognized that audience reception of Normans story hinged on acceptance of the psychiatrists evaluation. In fact, after Simon Oakland, the actor who played the psychiatrist, completed the scene, Hitchcock went over and shook the actors hand, saying Thank you very much, Mr. Oakland. Youve just saved my picture (qtd. in Rebello 128). Like Bloch, who contributed to the popularization of psychoanalysis in the post-war period, Hitchcock drew upon the writings of the Viennese doctor he had read while living in London in the 1920s. Indeed, despite the claims of many of his defenders, Hitchcock helped to contribute to the triumph of the therapeutic, offering sympathetic portraits

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of psychotherapy in Spellbound and The Wrong Man and using Freudian language in Notorious, Marnie, and Frenzy. Moreover, like Bloch, Hitchcock was concerned with the apparent link between sexual and political deviance. In Rope, for instance, Hitchcock connects the homosexual desires of his two main characters to their remorseless killing of their friend and to their proto-Nietzschean defence of authoritarianism, a theme similarly found in North by Northwest. As a refugee of both England and Germany, Hitchcock meditated on the horric crimes committed in the name of fascism and offered to contribute to a British documentary on the Holocaust, a project that never came to fruition. But the extended shower scene in Psycho, which Bloch limits to only a few sentences, visually recalls those crimes overseas. Unlike Bloch, who portrays Bates as a slovenly middle-aged man with obvious dysfunctions, Hitchcock references popular characterizations of the psychopath as a predatory yet innocuous gure, very difcult to discern publicly. In choosing Anthony Perkins to play the lead role, Hitchcock made Norman a much younger and much more sympathetic character, echoing most criminal accounts that stressed the abnormal normality of the psychopath. Furthermore, Perkinss appearance parallels most accounts of the psychopath as a particular physical type; as psychiatrist Lindner explained, the psychopath was lither, more agile, trim, cat-like in his movements, inclined to appear more youthful (Lindner, Psychopathic 621) than most imagined. Hitchcock also emphasizes Normans fragile personality; in particular, his often laboured speech. In the parlour scene between Marion and Norman, Hitchcock highlights what psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley referred to as the psychopaths semantic aphasia a disorder of speech in which ideas were difcult to convey and in which the words that were uttered did not successfully communicate anything meaningful. Eating in an ofce is just too ofcious, Norman tells Marion as well as explaining to her that the expression eats like a bird it its a fals-fals-fals-falsity. But more important than his speech patterns, Normans overall behaviour highlights his severe dysfunction. From his meticulousness in cleaning the bloodied bathroom to his compulsive need to change the linen on the beds in the unused motel rooms, Norman suffers from a heightened but dysfunctional super-ego that instils in him a thankless sense of discipline but no compassion. Hitchcock stresses Normans violent oscillation in sentiment, especially his sympathetic advice to Marion, which regresses into a vociferous outburst at her words

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about his mother. Lonely and anxious but lled with resentment toward outsiders, Norman emerges as a compendium of the traits that characterized the Cold War psychopath. In this way, even more than Bloch, Hitchcock makes mental health the focus of his lm. Most famously, Hitchcock extends the opening story involving Marion Crane, a struggling young woman who, because of her boyfriends unwillingness to commit, steals fortythousand dollars from the ofce where she works. Structurally, Hitchcocks extending her story makes the impact of her murder even more startling; but more importantly, as Raymond Bellour has argued, Hitchcock draws an implicit connection between her psychological state and Normans (240). According to Bellour, Psycho contains two narratives that eventually bleed into one another: one concerning a neurotic condition that culminates in the crime of theft and one concerning a psychotic condition that culminates in the crime of murder. Marions narrative represents a muted version of Normans own story; as Norman himself explains, Were all in our private traps clamped in them. And none of us can ever get out. Marion is involved in an illicit sexual relationship with a soon-to-be-divorced hardware-store owner whose nancial failings dampen her hopes of marriage. Equally important, she has no family upon which to fall back, except for her sister, who does not readily understand her predicament. Choosing to steal the deposit with which a lecherous customer entrusts her, Marion transgresses the law to escape her miserable condition, a decision in which she seems to take perverse pleasure as she fantasizes about the reactions of her employer and ofce mates. Psychologically unstable yet deliberate enough to evade the authorities, Marion emerges as the mildest of social deviants, unable, until she meets Norman, to control her immediate impulses. Norman, of course, represents the extreme version, a composite of traits (voyeurism, compulsive masturbation, sado-masochism, pornographic fetishism, and possibly homosexuality) that comprised the psychopath. But, by intentionally mirroring Marion and Norman in the parlour scene just before her gruesome murder, Hitchcock suggests that the line between neurosis and psychosis is quite porous both conditions exhibit perversions found in everyone. According to Hitchcock, Norman is not the only one guilty of such pleasures; the audiences enjoyment of the lm taps into their own desires to become Peeping Tom[s] (qtd. in Truffaut 266). Psychopathology was, for Hitchcock, an endemic problem; as Bates explains to Marion, We all go a little mad sometimes.

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Of course, Normans madness runs deeper than that of other characters, originating in the crime of matricide. As the psychiatrist in the lm explains, Matricide is probably the most unbearable crime of all most unbearable for the son who commits it. By linking Normans murderous aggression to his killing of his mother, Hitchcock drew upon a larger discussion in the early Cold War about the fragility of mother child relations. In his 1941 study of criminal behaviour, Dark Legend, psychologist Wertham, for instance, argued that the appropriate mythological framework through which to view contemporary culture was not the story of Oedipus but the story of Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who, according to Greek legend, avenged the murder of his father at the hands of Clytemnestras lover, Aegisthus, by killing his mother. Designating the condition the Orestes complex, Wertham contended that the dening impulse within man was not patricide but matricide; that is, the compulsive need to redeem the paternal legacy by punishing the mother for apparent transgressions against the father (Wertham). According to Wertham, as the power and inuence of American women increased, more and more men would adopt affectionate attitudes toward their emasculated fathers and adopt violently hostile feelings toward their mothers. The most inuential translation of the Orestes complex was writer Philip Wylies 1942 national bestseller Generation of Vipers, in which he coined the term momism to warn against the psychologically destructive inuence over-protective mothers had on their children. Depicting modern mothers as domineering gures, Wylie connected the alarming rise in morally weak, emotionally dependent, and sexually confused men to the reign of tyrannical mothers who had taken possession of the spirit (Generation 209) of their husbands and sons. His fears were derived from two related historical transformations. First, Wylie, whom Bloch admitted he esteemed (Once 220) as a writer, was only one of many outspoken critics to bemoan the social and economic changes during and after World War II that had opened avenues for increased female involvement in the workforce, in politics, and in civil society. As many historians have noted, the dislocations of the war, combined with the escalating costs of living and declining male wages, encouraged many middle-class, married women to enter the workforce and to participate in union activities, political campaigns, and other public organizations, in what Wylie lambasted as the womanization of America (Wylie, Womanization).4 Second, Wylies concerns about the movement of women into the public sphere were paralleled by concerns about a crisis of

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masculinity, as American men had supposedly abdicated control of the home, the neighbourhood, and the workplace to their wives. The American man, historian Arthur Schlesinger explains in a 1958 essay titled The Crisis of American Masculinity, was found as never before as a substitute for wife and mother changing diapers, washing dishes, cooking meals, and performing a whole series of what once were considered female duties (237). Wylies and Schlesingers anecdotal fears were given professional validation by psychologists, who detailed a growing masculinity complex in American women and a growing crisis in masculinity in American men. In a litany of works, including Ferdinand Lundbergs Modern Woman: The Lost Sex and Helene Deutschs The Psychology of Women, Wylies fears had become conventional wisdom. At the root of this blurring of gender lines, according to Wylie, was the destroying mother who had, through her controlling nature, distorted the psychological growth of her child. Wylies turn to the mother as the source of such dysfunction was prompted by the rise of ego psychology in psychoanalytic circles. Originating in the work of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, ego psychologists made the pre-Oedipal moment, that is, the mother child relationship, the cornerstone of development, arguing that the childs successful separation from the mother, rather than just his identication with the father, was primary. In this sense, maternal factors feelings of affection and well-being were essential, and maternal failures in this regard over-affection, smothering, and aggression were the primary sources of neurotic behaviour. This turn to the mother as the source of psychological dysfunction was reiterated in David Levys Maternal Overprotection, Edward Streckers Their Mothers Sons, and Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique. As characterizations of Wylies tyrannical mother abounded in the national media vehemently referred to as the overprotective mother, the encapsulating mother, and the overwhelming mother one psychologist went so far as to translate the Orestes complex into a universal condition (see, e.g., Bingham; Bundeson; Scheinfeld). In a number of inuential books, including The Basic Neurosis (1949) and Neurotic Counterfeit-Sex (1951), psychiatrist Edmund Bergler argued that the key stage in the development of the individual was not simply identication with the father in the context of the Oedipus complex but the prehistory of that phase, in which the newborn had to negotiate threats to its infantile megalomania from the mother as caregiver. According to Bergler, the

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infant maintained fantasies of omnipotence until subjected to the painful discovery that feeding times and sleeping schedules were regulated by the [g]iantess of the nursery (44). Forced into an insufferably passive role, the infant either reacted sadistically to this witch who now seemed capable of starving, devouring, poisoning, choking, chopping to pieces, draining and castrating him (46) or, under the vicissitudes of the drives, reacted masochistically by accepting, if not enjoying, such punishment. The only antidote to this situation was identication with the father who, because of his strength, was able to [demote] the threatening and fear-inspiring witch (46). But the eclipse of paternal authority under the recent accession of maternal power prevented this transition. The result, according to Bergler, was a continued fear of the maternal image and a libidinal attachment to the passive position of the nursery, in what Bergler termed psychic masochism. Berglers translation of the Orestes complex set the psychoanalytic framework for Psycho. Indeed, Bloch acknowledged that, after writing The Scarf, he had been contacted by Bergler, who corresponded with him about the origins of deviant behaviour and who made, according to Bloch, acute remarks (qtd. in Larson 23) about psychopathology that eventually owed into his own novel. But Hitchcock made the notion of psychic masochism, only marginally depicted in Blochs book, the visual and textual leitmotif of his lm. Throughout his career, Hitchcock meditated on the destructive role of mothers, portraying neurotic or psychopathic men damaged by their possessive mothers in lms such as Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest, and The Birds. But Psycho is his most elaborate translation of the Orestes complex. Unlike those who successfully negotiated the pre-Oedipal moment, disturbed individuals who never overcame the [g]iantess of the nursery became divided subjects, simultaneously identifying with the perceived aggressiveness of the mother and taking libidinal enjoyment in the punishment she inicted. As critic Michel Chion notes, the action in Hitchcocks lm is driven by the voice of the mother, a disembodied presence linked to no one particular gure (neither the mothers corpse nor Normans own body) but imposing its own law nonetheless (112). Having no adequate paternal gure through which to dethrone his mother, Norman never overcomes his psychic masochism, developing, instead, a maternal super-ego that, operating as an externalized representation of the castrating mother, punishes him for his transgressions and (unlike the paternal super-ego that offers entrance into the symbolic) prohibits normal psychological development.

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Consequently, Normans split psyche continuously oscillates between these two positions, at times, playing the role of the passive infant punished by a controlling maternal presence and, at times, acting as a sadistic gure seeking revenge. As Edmund Bergler explains, Pseudo-aggression . . . is used as a disguise before the tribunal of inner conscience, which accuses the defendant of libidinized masochistic passivity (70). The result is that, on a conscious level, [I]t is sadistic fantasies that dominate (70). Under the vicissitudes of the drives, this original psychic masochism is converted into an impulse for revenge against the mother and her surrogates. During the parlour scene in which Norman watches Marion eat dinner, he associates his mother with his collection of birds, claiming that she is as harmless as one of those stuffed birds. Admitting that his only pastime is taxidermy and that he only likes to practise his work upon birds because theyre kind of passive to begin with, Norman makes the connection to his mother, who also has been lled with sawdust. This connection is solidied at the end of the lm, when Mrs. Bates declares her innocence, stressing her inability to do anything except just sit and stare like one of [Normans] stuffed birds. His compulsion to repeat his original crime stems from the vicissitudes of his psychic masochism. Owls belong to the night world, explained Hitchcock. They are watchers, and this appeals to Perkins masochism. He knows the birds and he knows that theyre watching him all the time (qtd. in Truffaut 282). His killing of Marion as well as of the other young women buried in the swamp is the product of this overwhelming maternal super-ego. As Edmund Bergler explains, The unconscious conict established in early childhood is later stenciled, coded, and transferred with uncanny repetitiveness to innocent outsiders, who are used as a sort of movie screen upon which to reel off the individuals patterns (71). Norman extends his comparison between his mother and his birds to Marion as well, telling her you eat like a bird. In this way, Hitchcock links Marion to Normans mother, making her murder a repetition of his original matricide. Hitchcocks lm, then, centres on the rise of psychopathology in an era supposedly witnessing the collapse of traditional gender roles in the wake of declining paternal authority. Psycho was simply one of many cultural documents that prioritized proper Oedipal development as the framework for healthy character growth and that chastised middle-class mothers for their supposed parental failures. As the psychiatrist in the lm explains, Normans mother

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was a clinging, demanding woman who engulfed her son. A political and sexual deviant, the psychopath was an emblem of this dysfunctional (and maternal) order. For instance, Philip Wylies discourse on momism linked a range of abnormal psychological conditions, including alcoholism, homosexuality, political radicalism, and delinquency, to maternal overprotection. To quote Wylie, the mealy look of men today was the result of too much maternal inuence and so [was] the pinched and bafed fury in the eyes of womankind (Generation 197). Moreover, Wylie and his supporters in the psychoanalytic community linked the rise of momism to the perceived emasculation of American men, the result of declining wages, increased female employment, spreading corporate and political bureaucracies, a supposedly effeminate mass culture, and the sexual and political emancipation of wives a range of problems that had, according to Wylie, blurred traditional gender lines, undermined the structure of the family, and twisted mans naturally harmonious libidinal drives in perverse ways. As a mixture of images of the sexual psychopath and the authoritarian personality, Norman Bates represents the culmination of this panic over deviant behaviour in the early Cold War. But unlike Bloch and a litany of psychiatrists in the 1950s, all of whom argued that the rehabilitation of the family would heal the nations psychic wounds, Hitchcock was much more pessimistic. In Blochs novel, an emerging romance between Sam and Marions sister Lila hints at a possible return to normative family patterns in the wake of the transgressions of Marion and Norman. Even those psychiatrists who went to great lengths to explain the aetiology of psychopathology from the authors of The Authoritarian Personality to psychiatrists Lindner and Cleckley implored policy makers to address this problem. For instance, psychiatrists such as Nathan Ackerman and Don Jackson developed the family-therapy movement in the 1950s, a collaboration between practising therapists and local mental-health clinics to further research on child-rearing practices and to provide specic diagnosis and treatment for disturbed families (see Weinstein). This trend coalesced around a 1954 report issued by the Committee on the Family of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, which reiterated the link between family conditions and individual pathologies. But Hitchcock was less than encouraged. The utter dysfunction of the psychopath, despite the claims made by psychiatrists like Lindner, who argued he had rehabilitated the troubled young man in Rebel without a Cause, proved to Hitchcock the limitations of psychotherapy. As
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the psychiatrist in the lm explains, Norman Bates no longer exists . . . the other half has taken over probably for all time. Indeed, Psycho is a world in which paternal authority from Normans dead father to the economically castrated Sam, to the litany of ineffective policemen has disappeared, and with it, all hopes of normal family relations. The Psychopath in the Age of Rebellion Ironically, by the time Hitchcock produced his cinematic portrayal of the psychopath, the psychiatric community had already rescinded its original analysis. Throughout the 1950s, psychiatrists chipped away at the notion of the psychopath as a clinical entity by challenging the language of sexual psychopath laws, the guidelines used by examination boards, and the statutory criteria used to identify sexual psychopaths. As psychiatrist Philip Roche explained in 1958, The term psychopathic personality is no longer regarded by psychiatry as meaningful; yet it will probably remain embalmed . . . in the statutes of several states where the pursuit of demons disguised as sexual psychopaths affords a glimpse of a 16th-century approach to mental illness (qtd. in Kittrie 171). In 1952, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association used the term sociopath instead of psychopath to refer to anti-social behavioural disorders, claiming that the term was more limited, as well as more specic in its application (Committee 38). The manual also used the phrase sexual deviation instead of the broad classication psychopathic personality with pathologic sexuality as a way to specify the type of the pathologic behavior (39), instead of assuming an implicit connection among all such behaviours. By the late 1960s, psychiatrists such as Otto Kernberg began to refer to borderline personality organization or anti-social personality disorder (641) to clarify those forms of pathology once dened by the concept of the psychopathic personality. Equally important, other criticisms emerged from outside the psychiatric community. In 1950, criminologist Edwin Sutherland published an article, The Diffusion of Sexual Psychopath Laws, in which he argued that fears over the psychopath had been falsely generated by the national media and the psychiatric community, both of which had professional interests in pressuring state legislatures into action. Similarly, sociologist Paul Tappan, who had been hired as a consultant to the New Jersey Commission for the Study

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of the Habitual Sex Offender, offered a sceptical response to sexual psychopath laws, arguing in his 1950 report, The Habitual Sex Offender, that the psychopath was not a classiable entity and that the widespread passage of such laws reected a media-constructed panic rather than an actual statistical rise in sexual offences. These individual criticisms soon found their way into a larger national discussion. The anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s, for instance, successfully challenged the theoretical claims of psychoanalysis, the stigmatization of mentally ill patients, and the forced institutionalization of convicted criminals. Works by psychiatrists such as R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz and social theorists such as Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault as well as by ction writers such as Ken Kesey and William Burroughs challenged traditional notions of mental illness and criticized the prevailing system of psychiatric institutions that infringed on the rights of patients. Under such criticisms, federal courts throughout the 1960s limited the states power to incarcerate mentally ill patients for indeterminate periods, ensured that accused sexual criminals were given adequate legal counsel, reduced the inuence of psychiatric examining boards on criminal sentencing, and limited the use of drugs and psychosurgery on troubled patients (see Jenkins, ch. 5). The result was a sharp decline in the number of criminals institutionalized under sexual psychopath laws. But more importantly, Anthony Perkinss sympathetic portrayal of Norman Bates, despite Hitchcocks sinister depiction of Bates in the nal frames of the lm, in which he superimposes the image of a skull over Normans face, signalled a shift in certain perceptions of the psychopath. The cultural rebellion that characterized the 1960s brought a new image of the psychopath to the fore. Arguing that psychoanalysis merely reconciled the individual to a society dominated by economic concentrations of power, political bureaucracies, and a decrepit mass culture, theorists like Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, in works such as One-Dimensional Man and Man for Himself, challenged the assumption that a healthy personality was only produced by the internalization of paternal authority. Similarly, a number of writers, especially those associated with the Beat Generation, challenged the normative assumptions of psychoanalysis, arguing in works such as Allen Ginsbergs poem Howl and William Burroughss Naked Lunch that the madness of the psychopath was the only legitimate form of cultural rebellion. Most famously, writer Norman Mailer, in his inuential 1957 essay The White Negro: Supercial Reections on the Hipster, made

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the psychopath into a folk hero for the emerging counterculture. According to Mailer, The psychopath may indeed be the perverted and dangerous front-runner of a new kind of personality which could become the central expression of human nature before the twentieth century is over (345). Indeed, as madness, irrationality, sexual experimentation, and schizophrenia became key words for a generation in revolt against what Erich Fromm referred to as the sane society, Norman Bates became more and more an image of cultural rebellion. The psychopath, as the key symbol of the age of McCarthyism, re-emerged in an entirely new form in an age of discontent. Notes
1 On the production of the lm, see Rebello. 2 The history of the concept of the psychopath is detailed in Millon, Simonsen, and Birket-Smith. 3 On the spread of sexual psychopath laws, see Hacker and Frym. 4 On the changing role of women in post-war America, see Meyerowitz.

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