what is the central conflict of the movie Psycho?

Answer 1

Oedipus complex

Answer 2

Psycho the movie - not the awful book:
As in most Hitchcock's films we have sex and guilt and the CENTRAL conflict is not between characters or the protagonist's inward conflict.
In Psycho (like in Strangers on a Train), Hitchcock tries to build up a kind of breach in the viewer's moral convictions. In the beginning, we sympathize with a woman who has stolen money. When she is questioned by the policeman we hope that she will get away. But when she meets nice Norman Bates we hope that he will be able to persuade her to return and give back the money.
But Bates turns out to be a voyeur.
Then there is the shower scene (in his interview with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock said that this was the only passage in the original Robert Bloch novel that really interested him and made him film the book) which comes like a shock. Soon after, Norman rushes in and cleans the room, packs dead Marion and her bag and tries to dump her car which takes a very long time. The viewer gets nervous and instinctively hopes that the car will completely sink into the lake. We now sympathize with someone who has just covered up a homicide which we think his mother committed.
Later the sheriff tells Lila and Marion's 'fiancé' that Norman's mother is dead. The audience's sympathies turn to the young couple because of sheer curiosity: What did really happen?
As Truffaut puts it, the early 1960s (!) audience has in about 90 min. sympathized with a thief (who had extramarital intercourse), a (serial) murderer and then dismissed its loyalties because of a displeasing instinct and is then left alone with a disturbing end in which the main protagonist turns out to have completely gone nuts.
Psychoanalytic problems, in Hitchcock's movies often serve as what he called the McGuffin, something all attention is drawn to but which hardly has a meaning - it's about the expectations not about the expected. And he uses the viewer's often superficial knowledge about psychoanalysis and works with it. Psychoanalysis is a global sign system that can be understood in every Western culture and beyond.
Hitchcock said that Psycho is a film for film makers, it is not about the story, or actors, etc. but about filming techniques. This is true.
The Bloch novel is something else. It is one of the worst books I ever read (while the film is one of the best I ever saw). The NOVEL deals with a mother who (sexually?) abuses her son who kills her and her lover and then goes mad and kills women he thinks his mother would be jealous of. He now consists of at least three personalities, himself as a boy, himself as a grown up, and his mother. He is fat and bald and likes 'repellent' pornographic illustrations. The novel is ostensibly psychoanalytic only to present cheap soft pornography and repulsive murders. And it is boring!

Answer 3

Norman was abused by his mother and murdered her, which was why he was sent away. He still felt the need to answer to her as she was very controlling so he developed a split personality, the Norman personality and the Mother personality. He wanted a normal life and to have a normal relationship with a woman but "Mother" didn't want that so he was conflicted. In his mind, he didn't kill the women but Mother did.

Answer 4

Psycho is about a disturbed man whose mother ran his life and controlled him, causing him to hate women and want to hurt them. When he kills a female, in his mind he is killing his mother.

Answer 5

A man's conflict with his repressed sexual urges, he is guilty when he feels them. He kills the women he is sexually attracted to. His mother is his conscience,therefore he takes on her persona when he kills.

Answer 6

I would say it was a mentally ill man's struggle between reality and the hell he had created in his own mind.

Answer 7

An overbearing, ballbusting mother.

Answer 8

norman bates has issues with mother and how she controls him from the grave to the point that he becomes her and kills women

Answer 9

Between Norman and his mom.