The Real Norman Bates

Born in an extensive family, Ed's father was a drunk and frequently unemployed: he would beat Ed and his brother constantly. His mother

was a religious nut who exhausted a great deal of Ed's childhood abusing him and conforming him to the idea that all women, herself included,

were harlots and instruments of the devil. His serious sexual pyschosis in adulthood can be strongly attributed to his deranged mother.

Ed and his brother were only allowed to leave the house for school, where Ed was commonly bullied and regarded for his unusual mannerisms. His mother punished him whenever he tried to make friends; Ed was often noted for talking to and laughing with himself, as though speaking to others. This may have been where his supposed schizophrenia developed.

While his brother Henry slowly strayed from his mother's teachings, Ed remained blindly faithful to his mother's abusive and imposing ideologies. When a fire threatened their farm in 1944, Ed supposedly murdered his brother during the confusion, as his dead body was found with almost no burns and with serious blunt force trauma. His mother suffered a series of strokes before dying in 1945, leaving Ed with severe emotional scaring. His gradual unconscious recognition of her manipulation and his imagined sense of her betrayal to him due to her death lead to severe, acriminous fascination with women.

Trivia

- Ed Gein was the primary inspiration for the

character Norman Bates, from Robert Block's PSYCHO. Both suffered from extremely disturbed relationships with their mothers, and both were demented killers with strong sexual undertones to their motives.

Brief Background:

- Ed Gein's house was turned into museum; a monument to his insanity. The day his crimes were discovered, Authorities found the body of his second victim in his shed, decapitated and hung upside down. Searching the house, authorities found:

Four noses, entire human bones and fragments crudely removed from bodies, nine face masks made from connected patches of human skin, bowls made from human skulls, ten decapitated female heads with the tops sawed off, chairs covered in human skin, several disembodied female reproductive organs in a shoe box, skulls on his bedpost, a pair of lips on a drawstring for a window shade, and a lampshade made from skin from a human face.

This guy had way too much time on his hands.

Gein's Diagnoses

Gein was diagnosed with supposed Schizophrenia and sexual psychosis. His schizophrenia likely stemmed from a lonely childhood, where his brain fabricated auditory hallucinations in order to adapt to his isolation and social rejection. His sexual psychosis was born from his intensely unpleasant relationship with his mother, who abused him, made him feel worthless, and indoctrinated him under the pretense that women would destroy him.

While Ed genuinely valued his mother, she believed he would grow up a mindless drunken failure, like her husband. Her grip on his broken mind turned him into cruel and emotionless man, who felt powerless and betrayed when his mother eventually died. His unresolved tension towards his mother festered into a sexual violence that became his criminal life.

Efforts to determine or treat his insanity were not taken.

Psycho-historical background:

- When a mysterious fire burned down his house in 1958, Ed's response to the news was a careless shrug, saying "Just as well."

Guess he really didn't like that house.

- Though found guilty for his crimes after his SECOND trial, Ed still spent the remainder of his life in the safe comfort of a mental hospital. So if you really think about it, he didn't really pay for his crimes. Go Justice System.

- While his history and mannerisms were the inspiration for the creation of the character Norman Bates, Ed's hobby of creating masks out of human flesh was the inspiration for the appearance of Leatherface, the antagonist from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre film series.

Edward Theodore Gein was a small-time killer and pathological madman who murdered two women during the 1950s. He had bad family and childhood experiences and was diagnosed after his capture with schizophrenia and sexual psychopathy.

Neurological Factors

All of Ed's psychotic behaviors stemmed from a bad childhood, and not from genetic issues. Ed did adopt various neurotic impulses, including a deeply disturbed fascination with women (Ed later confessed he wanted to become one himself, and had strewn together a flesh suit from bodies he had taken from graves). As a child he had a strong interest in reading, and had very poor social skills. In his adulthood, Ed became a necrophiliac, but denied having any sexual relations with any of the dead bodies he had obtained.

A Body snatcher with a strong long-lived confused hatred of women, he robbed graves and used the body parts of both his victims and the bodies he.. excavated, as part of a macabre collection he kept in his house.

Ed Gein

Ed Gein was severely emotionally disturbed, his sexual psychosis shaping his adult mentality into a dangerous necromaniac. Ed described himself as being "in a daze" whenever he was robbing a grave or killing a victim. Lacking any stable sense of morality, Gein made a theater of blood and bodies out of the top portion of his house. His relationship with his mother spurred a disgusting obsession with female anatomy, which was the root of his demented psyche. After the death of his mother, Ed also occupied his leisure with adventure stories and death-cult magazines, particularly ones that displayed cannibals and Nazi atrocities.

Cognitive-Emotional Notations