Mental illness & Psycho

In an earlier era, the madman was seen as someone possessed by demons, as if an outside force had invaded the normal mind and pushed out the existing personality in favor of the manifestations of madness. The medical models hold that the madman of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was an undiagnosed mental patient, and that the way such a person was viewed was governed then by a network of religious and magical beliefs:

According to this view, it was only with the arrival of the calm, objective, scientific gaze of modern medicine that what had previously been regarded as a supernatural perversion was seen as a deterioration of nature (64).

Yet the author finds that this is not entirely the case and that at least since the time of the Greeks there was a certain sense of madness as a pathology and that there had always been medical treatment of madness in the West.

The degree of balance found between the idea of madness as demonic and as medical has varied

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ntally ill, we want to know if we are punishing the mind that committed the crime or a mind so altered that the real person, the real personality, cannot know that punishment is being inflicted. This is a real issue with reference to Norman Bates at the end, and it seems at the last that Norman Bates as a personality no longer exists, or at least is no longer in control of the body identified as Norman Bates. Director Alfred Hitchcock makes direct use of expectations the audience has of the meaning of madness and of the way mental illness might manifest itself. He does this through various filmic elements that also mirror cultural expectations. Hitchcock makes clear from the beginning that the interior of the mind is a subject in this film, for the film does not take an objective point of view but instead identifies itself subjectively with the character played by Janet Leigh. There are a number of reasons why he does this, but all relate to the central shift as this character is removed and the meanings of subjective and objective become confused. Hitchcock's use of the camera determines what the viewer will see and shapes how the viewer will think about what is seen. The film as a whole has a kinetic movement from the
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1676
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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