Psychopathology: Contamination and the House of Gothic

Abstract

Of all the Gothic horror scenarios which have sunk into the Western unconscious during the twentieth century, Psycho is one of the most powerful, although principally in its manifestation in Alfred Hitchcock’s film of that name. Here I want to approach instead Robert Bloch’s original story, published in 1959, and to put some specific questions about it in relation to the psychological, and to the text, the body and the law. It needs to be noted at the outset that this is an odd and difficult, perhaps an uncanny, task, because of a peculiarity in the story itself: which is that it contains its own psychological explanation, attached near the end as an authenticated account by a psychiatrist of a series of events which were, so we are led to believe, closely based on ‘real’ incidents.

It was purely accidental,’ he said. ‘I did not put any glass on her head. If she did, it was a joke. I certainly did not intend to shoot at it.’¹