Читать книгу The Handy Psychology Answer Book - Lisa J. Cohen - Страница 65

Freud believed that the primary areas of instinctual gratification, the erogenous zones, moved across childhood in predictable stages. His theory of the psychosexual stages included the oral, anal, phallic, and genital stages. Each psychosexual stage had specific psychological characteristics to it. For example, the anal stage was characterized by stinginess, concern with money, and/or wish for control. If the child was either undergratified or overgratified in any stage, the child could fixate at that stage, becoming, in effect, psychologically stuck.

How did Sigmund Freud’s theories influence a classic Alfred Hitchcock film?

Alfred Hitchcock’s classic suspense film Psycho, which came out in 1960, provides an excellent example of how Sigmund Freud’s theories have permeated popular culture. In the famous shower scene, Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh) is stabbed to death by a knife-wielding Norman Bates (played by Tony Perkins). At the end of the movie we learn that Bates’s excessive attachment to his mother has led him to murder her in a fit of jealous rage, following his discovery of her romantic involvement with another man. Attempting to keep his mother alive, however, he preserves her body in the basement. At the same time, he takes on her identity as his own alter ego. Finally, while dressed up as his dead mother, he murders Marion Crane to eliminate any possible rival for Norman’s attentions. Such unmistakably Oedipal themes are clearly indebted to Sigmund Freud and psychoanalytic theory.

Neurotic symptoms would reflect the person’s characteristic psychosexual stage. For example, obsessions and compulsions reflected regression to the anal stage. While Freud’s instinctual theory has been much criticized, the notion that developmental problems at any point in childhood can hinder later development and result in adult psychopathology must be seen as one of Freud’s greatest contributions.