Leibman and Freud

Speaking generally of Hitchcock’s films, however, one is bound to notice the many unique if not absurd ways in which characters die. As these deaths develop, so do the ways these characters are abused, including abuse directed toward women. As the male protagonist becomes increasingly sexually repressed and socially inadequate, the viewer will find that his punishments revolve around public humiliation. The equivalent does not apply for the female protagonist, for as her character becomes more overtly sexual, the viewer will find her violently attacked for expressing erotic desires. To quote Nina C. Leibman:
Many of the films about female madness situate sex and sexuality as the primary catalyst in the heroine’s illness. Male protagonists who are mad claim guilt complexes, journalistic curiosity, alcoholism as their domain. Women, however, are usually victims of their own sexuality. In these madness films, women are punished with insanity for expressing their desire, just as in film noir, they might be murdered for the same crime. Madness is the punishment for entering the male territory of expressive desire (Leibman 27).

To Leibman, this treatment screams of distorted Freudian Theory, altered in accordance with Hollywood’s gender stereotypes to place the woman in the guilty position. While Psycho continues the Hollywood tradition of portraying the sexually deprived male as the ill and violent afflicted, it also builds upon the incorrect stance that in women it is not repressing desire that creates illness, but expressing it. Hitchcock, being the sexually provocative genius he was, used this warped theory (knowingly or not) to build a system of increasingly exaggerated punishments delivered to those women characters who’d dare recognize/exploit their sexuality.