Abnormal Psychology in Film: Psycho Essays

The film I chose to watch is the original Psycho, filmed in 1960 and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The stars of the cast included Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, and Martin Balsam. (IMDB.com, 2006) The story begins about a young woman named Marion Crane from Arizona who is fed up with her life and longs to marry her boyfriend, Sam. Unfortunately, the couple has little money and cannot marry. One Friday afternoon, she is asked to deposit forty-thousand dollars for her boss. Seeing the money as an opportunity to start a new life with her lover, she takes off for California with the money. She ends up becoming tired from the drive and pulls into the Bates Motel. Unfortunately for Marion, the owner of the motel, Norman …show more content…
The reason that treating dissociative identity disorder patients is so difficult is because the patients themselves are often very secretive and even unaware of their condition. For them, it is the normal way with which they go about daily life and since they are not aware of it as an issue they will not seek out help. It is also a very difficult treatment to diagnose how does a psychologist separate imagination from dissociative identity disorder? We all have those moments where we may talk to ourselves, or certain situations in life may bring about different behavior that could be completely different from how we normally behave. In the movie Psycho, Norman's disorder was very easy to diagnose because it was very blatant and obvious. Dissociative identity disorder subjects do not always have cases that are this obvious (obvious symptoms include cross-dressing, etc). It is important to note that the symptoms of dissociative identity disorder include having "identities [that] will take control' of the person at different times, with important information about the other identities out of conscious awareness." (AllPsych.com, 2006) One could imagine the difficulty in identifying such the transfer of "control" from one personality to another. Unfortunately, the American public relies heavily on the entertainment industry to help them formulate knowledge and opinions. In the movie Psycho,

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