Character Analysis
Norma Bates: Norman, you're just jealous, you're not used to me having someone.
Norman Bates: I'm not jealous, you're my mother not my girlfriend!
Norma Bates is an overbearing, aggressive, manipulative woman who has poor behavioral controls and emotional outbursts. Norma seems to fit the category of secondary psychopathy more closely than primary psychopathy. According to Poythress & Skeem (2005), secondary psychopaths ‘‘disturbed emotional capacities may often manifest in hostile reactivity that interferes with stable relationships and adaptive functioning”. Norma appears to feel the need to emotionally attach for others, but does not seem to know how to for those attachments. Similar to Dahmer, Norma Bates tries desperately to attach to Norman and her other son Dylan, but her anger outbursts and lack of behavioral controls prevents her from getting close. She has uncontrolled emotions from anger to happiness and sadness and demonstrates all of them at seemingly random or inappropriate times. Piythress & Skeem also say that “secondary psychopaths, who tend to be reactively aggressive and demonstrate hostile attribution biases, demonstrate more errors in emotional perception” (207). This fits Norma as she is reactively aggressive, as demonstrated in her murder of Keith Summers after he raped her, and she has many errors in expressing and determining emotion in others. She is easily “irritated, aggressive, emotionally reactive, disinhibited, selfish” (208). A good example of her irritability is when Norman comes home and asks her to sign his permission sheet for track. Norma gets mad at him and makes him feel bad for trying out even though he wants to. She claims that she will “just do everything myself the way I always do”.
Verona & Vitale found that “relative to men, the women tended to be violent in the home and toward family members, inflicted significantly less serious injury, and were less often arrested following their violent behavior” (423). This is exactly what Norma displays and it raises the question of whether the PCL-R is a good indicator for determining female psychopathy? If these are the characteristics of female psychopathy and they line up more closely with secondary psychopathy or borderline personality disorder, are less women being diagnosed with primary psychopathy than those who actually have it? This brings up the need to alter the PCL-R to accommodate female psychopathy. Studies of psychopathy comparing both men and women find that “female offenders have revealed salient differences in the expression of psychopathy among women, including less evidence of early behavior problems, less evidence of overtly violent/aggressive symptoms, higher rates of BPD or HPD” (431). These are significant differences and connect female psychopathy directly to secondary psychopathy due to the lack of violent aggression and obvious criminal behavior that is prominent in primary male psychopathy. Despite this discrepancy, Norma still displays strong secondary psychopathy characteristics mainly because of her ability to attach to people. She has an attachment to Norman, just an abnormal one. She does not know how to express her feelings or to use them to connect with everyone, but she seems to experience them. All her concern is over Norman when something happens and she seems genuinely upset when something happens to him. Inability to form human attachment is the focal point of primary psychopathy and without it, Norma is not a primary psychopath.