Who is Norman Bates?

Norman Bates is the main antagonist in the film “Psycho”. It really took a lot of critical thinking to try to understand Bates and why he acted the way he did. I do not think it was possible for me to have an idea of all of this without the psychiatrist’s opinion given at the end of the film.

Now that I have had the time to watch the film in its entirety and reflect on what I just watched, I do believe I understand Bates to a certain degree. Bates has a certain disorder where he believes he can act as his controlling mother. Bates believed his mother was convincing him of doing terrible acts because she believed that they would arouse him, and she was not accepting of that. So, to make his mother happy he would carry out killing these women that would arouse him and he would dress like his mother with a wig because he believed he was her for periods of time.

Clearly Bates was shaped by his mother and he spent his whole life trying to appease her even if it meant killing people. Bates mother has been dead for years and I believe he killed her. I also think he preserved her body in the home for so long to keep the idea of her being alive so that he can carry out these acts of killing people because she said so. You could hear her voice from time to time in the film even know she’s past away because those are the voices Bates hears constantly in his head. Those voices are a vital reason why he became the monster he was in this film.