The Curse of the Divided Self - Part II

“We all go a little mad sometimes…” Norman Bates, Psycho

[N.B. This post contains spoilers of the movies Psycho and The Talented Mr Ripley]

Psychotherapists, such as Jung, believe that when we repress our desires, our flaws, our sins and bad memories and refuse to acknowledge their existence, we create a Shadow Self. The Shadow Self may be both feared and loved at the same time.

An extreme example of the Shadow Self at work is seen in the movie Psycho.

"A Boy's Best Friend is His Mother"

Norman Bates, the ultimate Mummy’s Boy with a severe case of the Oedipals (“A son is a poor substitute for a lover,” says he) refuses to acknowledge his desires. Indeed he can’t even bring himself to say the word ‘bathroom’ despite being a Peeping Tom.

On the surface, Norman seems like a nice quiet self-effacing chap. But whenever he experiences even a flicker of forbidden feeling, his Shadow Self, in the form of his mother rears her head in a display of “pathological jealousy”.

When Norman eventually becomes his Shadow Self, he loses his own identity. The psychiatrist in the movie explains, “When the mind houses two personalities, there is always a battle. For Norman, the battle is over.”

The Two Trilbys

The psychiatrist’s explanation of Norman Bates’ two personalities is similar to the scene in the novel Trilby when Gecko explains what happened to Trilby under her shadow Svengali.

“There was the Trilby you knew...But all at once—pr-r-r-out! presto!...with one wave of his hand over her—with one look of his eye—with a word—Svengali could turn her into the other Trilby, his Trilby, and make her do whatever he liked...you might have run a red-hot needle into her and she would not have felt it...”

The Demons in the Basement

After the death of his mother, Norman gradually adopts her identity.

In the movie, The Talented Mr Ripley, a similar situation occurs when Ripley adopts the identity of the dead object of his desire. The object of his desire is his Golden Shadow, his idea of perfection, the person that he would really like to be.

Tom Ripley is faced with a future of always having to kill the people he loves so that they never get to see the true face behind his mask.

He says, “Don’t you just take the past and lock it in the basement? That’s what I do. You don’t want anyone to see all the demons, how ugly it all is.”

Tom Ripley’s “private trap” (to quote Bates again) is this basement of the past.

Ripley says, “I’m always gonna be stuck in the basement, aren’t I? I always thought it would be better to be a Fake Somebody than a real nobody.”

Related Posts

The Curse of the Divided Self – Part I

Beauty and the Beast