In the first exchange between Norman and his mother that Marion overhears, Norman’s mother sounds like a jealous lover. She implies that eroticism, not to mention sex, are bad things.

And she humiliates Norman.

“Tell her that,” she says.

“Or do you have the guts, boy?” She constantly demeans and debases and shames Norman.

Even this briefest of brief exchanges is enough for Marion to form the opinion that Norman should not remain silent, that he should react, that he should somehow put a stop to it and maybe even walk away altogether.

Norman hesitates to interact with Marion in any intimate settings because he’s very, very attracted to her.

It’s not very clear why he is attracted to her.

Marion has a lot in common with Norman’s mother. She is opinionated. She’s cynical. She’s harshly critical. She’s observant. She’s shrewd. She’s street smart. She’s cunning. She’s a kind of maternal figure, a replica, if you wish, of Norman’s real mother.

And intimacy with her, sex, for example, would be highly incestuous.

So Norman is very loathe, reluctant to, for example, enter Marion’s cabin where she’s staying. He invites her to have dinner, a sandwich, actually, in his parlor, the empty room of his office. The parlor is full of stuffed birds mounted on the wall. Deathsigns of death are everywhere.

He tells Marion that taxidermy, stuffing animals, is his hobby, but he likes to stuff birds because they are passive and compliant and submissive.

Norman associates pleasure with submissiveness. He associates comfort with death. He stuffs birds because he can’t tolerate life. He wants to convert life into a mounted exposition, totally controllable, inert, immobile, and it is at his back and core with perfect access.

Norman rejects life in his hobbies, but also in his daily routine. He hides in the office. He maintains a motel, which is dead because the highway has been moved over the traffic, and the motel is always empty. All 12 cabins are always empty.

He says, “We have a vacancy. We have 12 vacancies. Everything is empty.” Empty exactly as Norman’s core is emptied.

The motel is a reflection and an extension, and in a way, an emblem of Norman. The motel represents Norman. It is empty. It is vacated exactly as Norman is empty and vacated. There’s nobody there, and it’s dead. There’s no life in it. There are no visitors. There are no guests in it.

Norman doesn’t even bother to ask people to sign the guest book.

And so the motel is Norman.

Norman keeps his mother, who he claims is an invalid. He keeps her in the house. House is separate from the motel. The motel is his kingdom. The motel is where he becomes. The motel is where he feels that he could be himself.

And the way to become himself, time and again, is to kill women, to kill birds, and to stuff them.

Also the women, but we’ll come to it a bit later.

When Marion asks him if he has friends, Norman’s automatic responses, “I’m thinking” response is, “A boy’s best friend is his mother.” And he exposes an immaturity coupled with an exceedingly powerful, omnipotent introject of his mother inside himself.

He says, “I give up on the rest of humanity because I have mother, and mother is all I need. She is my best friend.”

Norman says, “We are all in our private traps, clamped in these traps. And I know that none of us can ever get out. We scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other. And for all of it, we never budge an inch.

Marion answers, “Sometimes we deliberately step into those traps. And Norman retorts, “I was born in my trap. I was born in mine. I don’t mind it anymore.”

Marion is a bit taken aback, “But you should mind it.” And Norman says a bit mischievously, “Oh, I do mind it, but I say that I don’t. Sometimes when mother talks to me like that, I feel I like to go up there and curse her and leave her forever, or at least not light the fire.

But I know I can’t. She is ill.”

And of course, this is projection. It is Norman who is ill.

We don’t know enough about his mother at this stage.

Everything we’ve heard of her, we’ve heard from Norman.

But as the film unfolds, it becomes clear that the sick individual is actually Norman, and he’s projecting his sickness onto his mother.

And you haven’t heard the half of it.

Norman proceeds, “A son is a poor substitute for a lover. If I were to leave her, the fire will go out. It will be cold and damp like a grave.

If you love someone, you don’t do that to them, even if you hate them.

And then he catches himself, this rare admission that he loves and hates his mother, this ambivalence, and he says, “I don’t hate her. I hate what she has become. I hate the illness.”

As we discover ironically later in the film, it is Norman who made her what she has become.

So his hatred of the current transformation of his mother is actually self-hatred.

Because everything his mother has become was wrought and created by Norman, every single bit, every element, as we will see later.

Whatever his mother has been transformed into, she has been transformed into by Norman.

It was Norman’s doing.

So this is the ultimate expression of self-loathing, self-hatred, and self-rejection.

Norman is hating himself, rejecting himself, loathing himself through his mother.

His mother is this introject, this internal object, this voice inside his mind that keeps telling him, “You’re a bad object. You’re evil. You’re a liar. You’re spineless. You’re gutless. You are not very bright. You could be easily fooled. You should avoid women. You’re stupid.” And so on and so forth.

These constant emanations and communications from the bad object coalesce in his mind into a mother picture, a mother figure.

To be a mother means to demean and debase and shame and humiliate her son.

The son, never mind how much he wants it, can never be a lover.

In other words, the son can never be loved by the mother.

The mother’s role in Norman’s life is to maintain the integrity and the power of the bad object inside Norman’s mind as a way to control Norman, of course, for his own good.

Norman hates himself and rejects himself and loathes himself through this mother, introject, augmenting, empowering and magnifying the bad object with every sentence and with every action.

Because a good boy does his mother’s bidding.

A good boy does not disagree with mother, does not challenge mother, does not invalidate mother’s judgment. A good boy modifies, alters his behavior so as to prove mother right, to vindicate her and to validate her.

When Marion suggests to put the mother somewhere, elsewhere, Norman becomes aggressive. He stiffens in a threatening way and he says, you mean an institution, a manhouse? What do you know about caring? Have you ever seen the inside of one of those places? The laughing and the tears and the cruel eyes studying you?

And of course he’s describing his own nightmare, not his mother’s.

He’s afraid of ending up in a manhouse.

He continues, my mother there? And then he becomes ominously aggressive, almost violent. His body language is pretty threatening and invasive.

My mother there? She’s harmless, just one of those stuffed birds. She needs me. It is not as if she’s a maniac, a raving thing. She just goes a little mad sometimes.

We all go a little mad sometimes.

Haven’t you?

And this is a therapeutic moment, therapeutic moment for Marion.

She suddenly is able to see herself through Norman’s eyes, which is the first very important step in therapy, the ability to mirror the patient so that the patient can gain insight.

Ironically and crazily, insanely, Norman the madman becomes Marion’s therapist and succeeds to induce an awakening, a healing in her.

And she says she kind of snaps out of her reverie. She stole a lot of money and she’s on the run on the lamb, sometimes pursued by the police. And she says, he asked her, we all go mad sometimes. Haven’t you?

And she says, yes, sometimes just one time could be enough.

Thank you.

And at that moment, she decides to go back to Phoenix to return the money to turn herself in.

It was Norman, Norman who cured her, healed her, brought her to her senses and restored her morality and her reality testing with his madness.

Very, very crucial and amazing insight elaborated on by the likes of Michel Foucault and Althusser, but we’re not going to it. I won’t torture you the way Norman is torturing Marion later in the movie.

Time for wine break. And yes, you keep wondering if it is wine. This is Halloween. What can I say?

As I’ve said, because of the harsh internal introject, what we would have called earlier in the history of psychology, the super ego, the sadistic super ego, the harsh inner critic, because of these voices that keep tormenting him.

Norman is very attuned, very sensitive to lying. He’s hyper vigilant. He’s sure that everyone is trying to fool him.

This is what I told him that he’s stupid, that he’s gullible.

So he’s constantly on the hunt for clues and proofs and evidence that people are lying to him.

Marion lied to him about her name and then foolishly forgot the name that she has used. And the lie was exposed. She signed the guestbook using another name.

And Norman smiles to himself. It’s a kind of triumph, a victory. He exposed her for the liar that she is.

At that moment, of course, she deserved to be punished.

The inner voice in his head, the mother introject, is very punitive. It is self-punitive in the sense that the mother introject seeks to punish Norman for who he is, for what he is, not only for his misbehavior, but for his constitution, for his composition.

So the mother introject also seeks to punish others external to Norman, people who may threaten Norman, people who may fool Norman, people who may seduce Norman, people who may tempt Norman, people who may lead Norman astray, people who may take advantage of Norman.

The mother, in other words, is a protector.

Now, at the end of the movie, there’s a caricature of a psychiatrist who kind of analyzes Norman’s psychology. And I beg to differ with most of the things he says. I actually disagree with many of them.

He says, for example, that the mother is romantically jealous of Norman, that there was an incestuous relationship between them and the way he was jealous, romantically jealous of his mother and her lover.

He projected this jealousy and he assumed that his mother is jealous of him.

So the psychiatrist’s thesis is Norman was jealous when he saw his mother with another man and he, Norman, projected this onto his mother and he assumed that his mother would be jealous if she were to see him with a woman.

This is only a part of the picture. I think the bigger part is the protective or overprotective nature of the mother. She is there to defend Norman because he is defenseless and helpless. It’s a form of internalized, learned helplessness.

The minute Norman caught Marion lying to him, she became a potential seductress, a manipulator, an enemy because lying is instrumental. Lies are weaponized very often.

Norman doesn’t have any idea what Marion might want, but she definitely doesn’t mean well. At that point, she becomes an enemy and the protector state, which is the mother, essentially a kind of violent psychopath, the protector state is triggered.

Remember that in my work, there are self-states, especially in people with mental health issues, personality disorders, there are self-states.

One of the self-states is always the protector, protects the other self-states. This protector self-state is usually a psychopath.

We have this, for example, DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Psychopathy, Classic Psychopathy and so on.

Same with Norman, he has a protector state and Marion has triggered this protector state.

But at the same time, he finds Marion sexually irresistible. He is a voyeur. He peeps through a hole in the wall in the partition separating his office from Marion’s cabin and he sees her undressing and naked.

The minute he does, his sex is sexually aroused and he rushes to his mother because this creates an enormous conflict.

The conflict is twofold. He’s cheating on his mother with another woman and his sexual arousal renders him fallible, vulnerable, in danger.

He perceives sex or sexual attraction as ominous, a threat and he rushes to mummy for protection and also to make clear to her that he is not about to cheat on her.

His loyalty lies with her. She is the only woman in his life.

And then, of course, we have the iconic shower scene. We see the blood circling the drain. It’s a purge, a purging of evil thoughts. It is a symbolic scene.

Norman is genuinely shocked by the murder, but the murder was the only way for him to get rid of the temptation by purging the evil that has invaded his mind via the sexual vector and also to restore the harmony with his ever-observant, ever-present mother.

Norman seems quite skilled at removing all traces to the crime, the murder of Marion, body included. He carries the body from the room to the trunk of his car the way a bridegroom carries his bride over the threshold after a wedding.

Very interesting. He enacts life amid carnage. He’s very gentle with the body. He doesn’t just dump it or drag it or whatever.

And so there is a kind of symbolic wedding which involves death rather than life. And crossing the threshold of the motel, which, as you remember, is Norman writ large. The motel is Norman magnified. Crossing the threshold of the cabin, leaving the motel behind, is actually taking his bride to face the world.

Which world is this? The world of death, because this is Norman’s only world.

The birds are stuffed. And as we shall discover soon, his mother is long dead. The mother that he communicates with daily, interacts with, argues with, listens to, adheres to, is intimate with. She doesn’t exist. She has died 10 years ago, 10 years before.

Norman’s world is inverted. It is death that brings life. And life threatens death. One by one, society begins to encroach on his erstwhile, isolated and protected world.

There’s Abrogast, the detective, Sam Loomis, Marion’s boyfriend and Marion’s sister. He kills Abrogast, but he doesn’t stop more people from coming. He feels besieged.

His interaction with Sam Loomis, for example, is already very disrupted. He’s unable to function. He’s unable to talk coherently. He’s falling apart. He’s disintegrating. He’s sliding into a psychotic state.