Payal Mathur

Child Abuse in Sidney Sheldon's Tell Me Your Dreams and Robert Bloch's Psycho

Literature is one of the leading ways in which the human race grapples with and interprets reality. Literature is an expression of life. The authors are free to use words through their imagination in their works, in offering the readers about the description of the life that frequently occurs in human life.

Literature allows readers to access intimate emotional aspects of a person’s character that would not be obvious otherwise. It benefits the psychological development and understanding of the reader. For example, it allows a person to access emotional states from which the person has distanced himself or herself. An entry written by D. Mitchell featured in ‘‘The English Journal’’ explains how the author utilized young adult literature in order to re-experience the emotional psychology she experienced as a child which she describes as a state of “wonder”.

Hogan also explains that the temporal and emotional amount which a person devotes to understanding a character’s situation in literature allows literature to be considered “ecological[ly] valid in the study of emotion”. This can be understood in the sense that literature unites a large community by provoking universal emotions. It also allows readers to access cultural aspects that they are not exposed to thus provoking new emotional experiences. Authors choose the literary device according to what psychological emotion he or she is attempting to describe, thus certain literary devices are more emotionally effective than others.

Furthermore, literature is being more popularly regarded as a psychologically effective research tool. It can be considered a research tool because it allows psychologists to discover new psychological aspects and it also allows psychologists to promote their theories. For example, the print capacity available for literature distribution has allowed psychological theories such as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to be universally recognized.

Maslow’s ‘‘Third Force Psychology Theory’’ even allows literary analysts to critically understand how characters reflect the culture and the history in which they are contextualized. It also allows analysts to understand the author’s intended message and to understand the author’s psychology.] The theory suggests that human beings possess a nature within them that demonstrates their true “self” and it suggests that the fulfilment of this nature is the reason for living. It also suggests that neurological development hinders actualizing nature because a person becomes estranged from his or her true self. Therefore, literary devices reflect the characters’ and an author’s natural self. In his ‘‘Third Force Psychology and the Study of Literature’’, Paris argues “D.H Lawrence’s “pristine unconscious” is a metaphor for the real self. Thus Literature is a reputable tool that allows readers to develop and apply critical reasoning to the nature of emotions.

The novels that I have chosen for the project as basically Psychological- based. The authors have dealt with the minds of the characters and it shows how a single disorder might create big problems for the characters without their own knowledge. The first novel which I have dealt with is Tell Me Your Dreams by Sidney Sheldon and the second one is Psycho by Robert Bloch. Both the novels have single protagonists who have no idea that they are suffering from a mental disorder which made them kill many people. This particular disorder is called Dissociative Identity Disorder. The two main characters: Ashley Patterson and Norman Bates have the same disarray which is related to their childhood experiences.

Sidney Sheldon was an American award-winning writer. His started his career through television and entered the world of literature when he turned 50. He started writing his best-sellers such as Master of the Game (1982), The Other Side of Midnight (1973) and Rage of Angles (1980). He wrote his best successful comedy The Bachelor and the Bobby- Soxer (1947). His novels often featured determined women who persevere in a tough world run by hostile men. The novels contained a lot of suspense and devices to keep the reader turning the page. One of his best suspense novels of all time is Tell Me Your Dreams (1998). He had a special interest in mystery, horror suspense and thriller and his novels are mostly based on these topics. The major themes that we find in his novels are crime, deception and sex and these themes create the interests of readers who read his novels. He is the best seventh fiction writer of all time.

He has written the screenplays for twenty- three motion pictures, including Easter Parade (with Judy Garland) with Annie, Get Your Gun. He also created four long-running television series, including Hart and I Dream of Jeanie, which he produced. He was awarded the 1993 Prix Litteraire de Deauville, from the Deauville Film Festival, and is now included in the Guinness Book of Records as “The Most Translated Author”.

Tell Me Your Dreams is a 1998 novel written by Sidney Sheldon. It is a mysterious, thriller and fictional novel which revolves around three women Ashley Patterson, Toni Prescott and Alette Peters. Ashley is a shy workaholic in her late- twenties. She is always neatly dressed with patrician features, a slim figure and intelligent with anxious brown eyes. There was a quiet elegance about her, a subtle attractiveness. Ashley was employed at Global Computer Graphics Corporation, a successful, fast-growing young company with two hundred employees. Her co-worker Toni Prescott is an extrovert singer and totally opposite to Ashley in her behaviour. She hated working at Global Computer Graphics. She was twenty- two years old, impish, vivacious, and daring. She was half smouldering, half firecracker. Her face was puckishly heart-shaped; her eyes were a mischievous brown, her figure alluring. She had been born in London and she spoke with a delightful British accent. She was athletic and love sports, particularly winter sports: skiing and bobsledding and ice- skating, on the other hand, Alette Peters is an introvert and a successful artist. She was twenty years old and was plain-looking, attractive or stunningly beautiful, depending upon her mood or how she was feeling about herself. But she was never simply pretty. Part of her charm was she was completely unaware of her looks. She was shy and soft-spoken with a gentleness that was almost an anachronism. Alette was a completely different person. She was genuinely kind and sympathetic and enjoyed helping others.

The three women do not get along very well because of their dissimilar interests. Toni and Alette have a good friendship but Toni dislike Ashley and because of that reason they never came across each other. All three have issues with their mothers who told them that they will not get anything in their life. Ashley fears that somebody is following her. She finds the lights of her house turned on when she returns to her home after work, she also sees her clothes all messed in her drawers and someone has written “You will die” on her mirror with lipstick. She thinks that someone has broken into her house. She requests for a police escort Deputy Sam Blake for her security, but the next morning he was found dead in the alley covered with a bed sheet. Four murders have already taken place in the same manner: Jim Clearly, who was murdered in Bedford, Dennis Tibble, who was murdered in Cupertino, Jean Claude Parent, who was murdered in Quebec City and Richard Melton, who was murdered in San Francisco. All men are stabbed and castrated and were having sex before they were murdered. Evidence points out that the same woman being involved in all three murders. When a gift from one of the murdered men to Toni is found among Ashley’s things, she is identified as the murderer and arrested. At this point, it is revealed that the three women are three selves of a woman suffering from multiple personality disorder.

“Sheriff Dowling took a deep breath. Ashley Patterson...Toni Prescott...Alette Peters...

They’re all the same fucking person”

Ashley’s father convinces an attorney friend to represent Ashley. The second half of the book deals with the trial session, complete with endless arguments between opposing psychiatrists as to whether MPD is real or not. We see many doctors squabbling about the topic of MPD. Finally when Ashley’s advocate, Davis introduces Toni, the violent alter of Ashley, the court is convinced that Ashley is innocent.

Ashley is then, admitted to an insane asylum and in the course of therapy, she is introduced to her “two” alters. She relives the horrific incidents that shattered her mind. She was sexually abused by her father when she was six-years-old, which created her alter Toni and eight-years-old, which created her alter Alette and this made her develop a strong hatred towards men. This made her kill the five men that came near her.

In the asylum, Ashley is treated by Doctor Gilbert for MPD. He is attracted towards her and during her crisis; he too feels her pain and wants to comfort her. The structuring of both the alters is very interesting since the first alter represents her struggle and fear as a helpless child without sexual maturity. Toni develops into a protective one and becomes murderous when encountered with similar conditions while on the other hand, Alette represents her feeling of shame and pain of being broken and thus this alter develops a source of console exhibiting warmth and motherly love and has a good rapport with Ashley.

However, Toni was enraged when she saw the news of her father getting married to a woman who has a three-year-old daughter; she feared that the girl would face the same fate that she faced in her early age. Doctor Gilbert drains out her anger by showing the news every day, therefore, making Toni softer every passing day.

The softer side of Toni was just front side for Doctor Gilbert so that she could go out of the asylum and kill her father who is staying in Hamptons for Christmas. In the end, Ashley is cured properly of her Multiple Personality Disorder and she goes back to her home.

Robert Albert Bloch was an American fiction writer who writes mainly about crime, horror, fantasy and science fiction. He is famous for his novel Psycho which is a psychological novel. The novel was also adapted into a film of the same name. His likeness for a witticism can be easily seen in the titles of his novels like Tales in a Jugular Vein, Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of and Out of the Mouths of Graves. Bloch has written over hundreds of short stories and 30 novels. His specialization is in crime and horror stories approaching it from a psychological perspective.

Bloch was a contributor to pulp magazines such as Weird Tales in his early career and was also a prolific screenwriter and a major contributor to science fiction fanzines and fandom in general.

He won the Hugo Award, the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. In 200, The Library of America selected Bloch’s essay “The Shambles of Ed Gein” (1962) for enclosure in its two-century traditional of American true crime.

His favourites in his own works were The Kidnapper, The Star Stalker, Psycho, Night- World, and Strange Eons. His works were extensively adapted into movies, televisions, comics and audio books.

There were much writing on Bloch:

An early work by Australian writer, Graeme Flanagan, Robert Bloch: A Bibliography (1979) which includes an interview with Bloch and memoirs by fellow writers such as Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, Mary Elizabeth Counselman and Fritz Leiber.

An essay by Lee Prosser about Robert Bloch was published in The Rosewell Literary Review at Rosewell, New Mexico, 1996.

Bloch was also a major contributor to science fiction fanzines and fandom in general. In the 1940s, he created the humorous character Lefty Feep in a story for Fantastic Adventures. He also worked for a time in local vaudeville and tried to break into writing for nationally-known performers. He was a good friend of the science fiction writer Stanley G. Weinbaum. In the 1960s, he wrote 3 stories for Star Trek.

There is an essay on Bloch’s work, with particular reference to the novels Psycho and The Scarf, in S.T. Joshi’s book The Modern Weird Tale (2001), Joshi examines Bloch’s literary connection with Lovecraft in a further essay in The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004). And there is much other work of great writers which talks and appreciates the work of Robert Bloch.

Robert Bloch won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1959, the same year that Psycho was published. Bloch had written an earlier short story involving split personalities, "The Real Bad Friend", which appeared in the February 1957 Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, that foreshadowed the 1959 novel, Psycho. However, Psycho also has thematic links to the story "Lucy Comes to Stay". Psycho is one of the greatest works of Robert Bloch. It is a horror, thriller and psychological fiction which is a story of Norman Bates, his strange relationship with his mother and the motel he runs on the side of the deserted highway. The story was later adapted into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock of the same name in 1960.

Norman Bates is the main character of the novel. He is in his mid-to-late forties, short, overweight and homely. The novel starts when Norman is reading in his office and his mother approaches and scolds him for reading dirty stuff and magazines. His mother all his life taught him that all women (except her) are whores and he should not get involved with them. The two gets into a fight as the mother says to him that he is too weak, too afraid to stand up for her. She confronts everything about Norman from his social skills to his sexual preferences while he silently hears all. But in his mind, he thinks about the freedom he would get if he will kill his mother. Then he hears a ring which is an indication that someone has come for the room in the motel.

Marion Crane began her life as Mary Crane, an ill-fated heroine of the novel. She arrives at the Bates motel, exhausted and badly in need of a night’s rest. She has driven across several states in high thundering rain. She has stolen forty thousand dollars from her real estate boss and hopes to meet her boyfriend, Sam Loomis so that he could set his debts and they could start their married life together. After getting lost in the highway because of the heavy rain, Mary arrives at the Bates motel and asks for a room. Norman has never interacted with a woman in her life apart from his own mother. She felt very shy talking to Mary and asks her for a dinner at his house. She accepts the offer and when she hears about the horrific and seemingly abusive relationship of Norman and his mother, she suggests to him that he should put his mother in an institution. This angers Norman and he shouts that his mother is not crazy. Mary excuses herself and goes to her room and decides to return the money she has stolen as she did not want to be tortured by guilt. Moments later, an old woman enters Mary’s room when she is in the shower and beheads her.

Moments before his mother beheads Mary, Norman was watching Mary undressing through a peephole which was there in his office. He was drunk at that time and passed out in his chair. He woke to find Mary’s dead body and immediately suspects his mother to be the murderer. He considers letting the mother go to the prison but the thought of getting separated to his mother scares the hell out of him. He has spent his whole life with her and doesn’t want to spend a single moment without her. He knows that he must cover the murder and help mother not to go to prison. He cleans the murder scene and deposits Mary’s corpse and the car in a sand hole behind the motel and thinks that he has gotten away with the murder. Meanwhile, Mary’s boss, Mr. Lowery, has hired a private detective to find out Mary and return forty thousand dollars to him. That detective Mr. Aborgast has traced Mary to the motel and demanding to speak to Norman and his mother. He sees the mysterious figure, who appears to be an old woman. He informs that to Sam and tells him that he will go and enquire that whose figure is this. When he got up there, the figure comes in front of him and attacks him and slits his throat. Norman deposits Aborgast’s body at the same place where he places Mary’s body, in the sand hole

To Norman’s bad luck, Mary’s Crane’s little sister, Lila Crane got anxious about her disappearance and meets Sam Loomis as she thought she would have come to him. They too traced her to be there at the motel and Lila is convinced that something might have happened to Mary there. She tells it to the local sheriff, but he tells her that she is wrong as he says that he knows Norman Bates for a long time and he is a good man who cannot hurt anyone. He says that Norman’s mother has been dead for years after poisoning herself and her lover, Joe Considine. Lila was unconvinced by that explanation and Sam that they should go there and searches for the house to find out the figure. They go there, pretending to be a couple. There Sam distracts Norman while she explores the house searching for the clues. Sam does his best to distract Norman but he could not, he drops his protector and Norman smashes the whisky bottle over Sam’s head which makes him unconscious. On the other hand, when Lila explores the house she sees the whole house and later decides to go to the basement. There she finds a tiny woman whom she thinks as Mrs. Bates but when she goes near it she finds that it is a mere corpse. Norman appears behind Lila dressed in his mother’s clothes, speaking in a high, affected voice saying, “I am Norma Bates”. He raises a butcher knife and runs toward Lila, but Sam wrestles with him and keeps him away from her until he can be arrested. In the weeks later, it is found out that it was Norman who poisoned his mother and her lover, Joe. To keep the crime under the mask, he developed a split personality in which his mother became his alternate self. At trial, Norman is found to be insane and is institutionalized for life and the end of the novel, Norman has totally become his own mother and lost his own personality.

Child Abuse in Life and Literature

Child abuse or child maltreatment is an act when a parent or a caretaker, whether through action or fails to act, causes injury, death, emotional harm or risk of serious harm to a child. There are many forms of child abuse including neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, exploitation and emotional abuse.

In European countries, it was very important to prevent child abuse and many detailed laws and policies exist to address the issue. Different jurisdictions have developed their own definitions of what constitutes child abuse for the purpose of removing a child from his/ her family and/ or prosecuting a criminal charge.

There are many interacting causes of child abuse and neglect. Characteristics or circumstances of the abuser, the child and the family may all contribute. In many cases, the abuser was abused as a child. Substance abuse has been identified as a key factor in a growing number of cases. In some cases abuser do not have the education or skills needed to raise a child, thus increasing the likeliness of the abuse, and proving inadequate parental role models for future generations. Children who are ill and disabled are more likely to be the target of child abuse.

Patterns of abusive behaviour may result in the physical and mental impairment of the child or even death. Small children are especially vulnerable to physical injuries such as whiplash or shaken infant syndrome or even multiple personality disorder. Abused children are more likely to experience anxiety, depression, shame, truancy, guilt or even suicidal thoughts to engage in criminal activities.

The after effect of child abuse that I have been dealing with is of Multiple Personality Disorder. During the past twenty years, there have been many criminal trials involving defendants claiming to have multiple personalities. The charges covered a wide range of activities, including murder, kidnapping, rape and arson. Multiple Personality Disorder is a very controversial topic among psychiatrists. Some psychiatrists believe that it does not exist. On the other hand, for years many reputable doctors, hospitals and social service organizations have been treating patients who have been suffering from MPD. Some studies estimate that between 5 and 15 percent of psychiatric patients are affiliated with it.

Current statics from the Department of Justice indicate that approximately one-third of juvenile victims of sexual abuse are children under six years of age, and that one out of three girls is sexually abused the age of eighteen. Most reported cases of incest to involve a father and a daughter. It is not just about girls but also about boys who suffer from the same evil of society. They usually suffer from emotional abuse or neglect whereas, on the other hand, girls usually suffer from sexual abuse.

A research project in three countries suggests that MPD affects one percent of the general population.

Dissociative disorders are often misdiagnosed, and studies have shown that, on average, people with MPD have spent seven years, prior to an accurate diagnose. Two- thirds of the cases of multiple personality disorder is treatable.

Child abuse in life has a great impact on literature as well. There are many writers who have written about child abuse and mentioned about its impact on the minds of the person. Authors like Cathy Glass, J.D. Stockholm, Lisa James, Toni Maguire, Sidney Sheldon, Robert Bloch and many more have explained a lot about child abuse. Authors write books and articles on this topic to aware the society and remove the sin.

Sidney Sheldon’s Tell Me Your Dreams and Robert Bloch’s Psycho are basically based on actual cases.

When we start the novel Tell Me Your Dreams, we see that the author has written that “This is a work of fiction based on actual event”. The novel is actually based on real incidents because child abuse is not something that we do not see in real life but it is very common and is easily seen in our day-to-day life. It is not just in one country but is there in many countries. As I have mentioned that one of the effects of child abuse is Multiple Personality Disorder, it is true that one of the effects of child abuse is what we have seen in the novel. When a person is suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder, s/he has no idea of what s/he is doing, what the other personality is making them do. Therefore, we can also not blame the person because it is not what they want to do but it is the result of what the creation of his or her imagination is making them do. This is very well presented in the novel through the character of Ashley Patterson as it is not her fault to kill the men who tried to have sex with them. Toni is trying to save her from the men because she has faced how it feels as Ashley’s father has already sexually abused her in her childhood. Her mother also didn’t support her and called her a little lying bitch when she told her the truth about her father. No one believed her and with the trauma of her childhood, her imagination created the two alter which we can also say ‘a way of escape from reality. The concept of Multiple Personality Disorder is very well explained in the novel through all the trails and hoe many doctors do not believe in this mental disorder. It is not something which one should be ashamed of but it is just something which can be cured if handled properly. Ashley was not completely cured but coordinating with her alters helped him have a better life with no worries and jealousy which Toni had with Ashley. This is based on true events and is very well explained in the novel. The ending of the novel is very thoughtful and teaches that we should end child abuse and sexual abuse against women as it creates a deep impact on their mind and body which totally changes their personality and make them go through a lot of problems. Sidney Sheldon deserves a lot of respect for this wonderful book in a totally different and creative way.

Norman Bates is a fictional character created by writer Robert Bloch as the main character in his novel Psycho. The character Norman Bates in Psycho was loosely based on Ed Gein.

Born at the turn of the century into the small farming community of Plainfield, Wisconsin, Gein lived a repressive and solitary life on his family homestead with a weak, ineffectual brother and domineering mother who taught him from an early age that sex was a sinful thing. Eddie ran the family's 160-acre farm on the outskirts of Plainfield until his brother Henry died in 1944 and his mother in 1945. When she died her son was a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor, still emotionally enslaved to the woman who had tyrannized his life. The rest of the house, however, soon degenerated into a madman's shambles. Thanks to federal subsidies, Gein no longer needed to farm his land, and he abandoned it to do odd jobs here and there for the Plainfield residents, to earn him a little extra cash. But he remained alone in the enormous farmhouse, haunted by the ghost of his overbearing mother, whose bedroom he kept locked and undisturbed, exactly as it had been when she was alive. He also sealed off the drawing room and five more upstairs rooms, living only in one downstairs room and the kitchen.

"Weird old Eddie", as the local community know him, had begun to develop a deeply unhealthy interest in the intimate anatomy of the female body - and interest that was fed by medical encyclopedias, books on anatomy, pulp horror novels and pornographic magazines. He became particularly interested in the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Second World War and the medical experiments performed on Jews in the concentration camps. Soon he graduated on to the real thing by digging up decaying female corpses by night in far-flung Wisconsin cemeteries. These he would dissect and keep some parts heads, sex organs, livers, hearts and intestines. Then he would flay the skin from the body, draping it over a tailor's dummy or even wearing it himself to dance and cavort around the homestead - a practice that apparently gave him intense gratification. On other occasions, Gein took only the body parts that particularly interested him. He was especially fascinated by the excised female genitalia, which he would fondle and play with, sometimes stuffing them into a pair of women's panties, which he would then wear around the house. Not surprisingly, he quickly became a recluse in the community, discouraging any visitors from coming near his by now neglected and decaying farm.

Gein's fascination with the female body eventually led him to seek out fresher samples. His victims, mostly women of his mother's age, included 54-year old Mary Hogan, who disappeared from the tavern she ran in December 1954, and Bernice Worden, a woman in her late fifties who ran the local hardware store, who disappeared on the 16th November 1957. Mrs. Worden's son Frank was also the sheriff's deputy, and upon learning that weird old Eddie Gein had been spotted in town on the day of his mother's disappearance, Frank Worden and the sheriff went to check out the old Gein place, already infamous amongst the local children as a haunted house.

There, the gruesome evidence proved that Gein's bizarre obsessions had finally exploded into murder, and much, much worse. In the woodshed of the farm was the naked, headless body of Bernice Worden, hanging upside down from a meat hook and slit opens down the front. Her head and intestines were discovered in a box, and her heart on a plate in the dining room. The skins from ten human heads were found preserved, and another skin taken from the upper torso of a woman was rolled up on the floor. There was a belt fashioned from carved-off nipples, a chair upholstered in human skin, the crown of a skull used as a soup-bowl, lampshades covered in flesh pilled tautly, a table propped up by human shinbones, and a refrigerator full of human organs. The four posts on Gein's bed were topped with skulls and a human head hung on the wall alongside nine death-masks - the skinned faces of women - and decorative bracelets made out of human skin. The stunned searchers also uncovered a soup bowls fashioned from skulls, a shoebox full of female genitalia, faces stuffed with newspapers and mounted like hunting trophies on the walls, and a "mammary vest" flayed from the torso of a woman. Gein later confessed that he enjoyed dressing in this and other human-skin garments and pretending he was his own mother.

The scattered remains of an estimated fifteen bodies were found at the farmhouse when Gein was eventually arrested, but he could not remember how many murders he had actually committed. The discovery of these Gothic horrors sent shock waves throughout Eisenhower-era America. In Wisconsin itself, Gein quickly entered local folklore. Within weeks of his arrest, macabre Jokes called "Geiners" became a statewide craze. The country as a whole learned about Gein in December 1957, when both Life and Time magazines ran features on his "house of horrors."

After ten years in a mental hospital, Gein was judged competent to stand trial. Although considered fit to stand trial, Eddie was found guilty, but criminally insane. He was first committed to the Central State Hospital at Waupon, and then in 1978, he was moved to the Mendota Mental Health Institute where he died in the geriatric ward in 1984, aged seventy-seven. It is said he was always a model prisoner - gentle, polite and discreet. He died of respiratory and heart failure in 1984.

The crimes that Ed Gein and Norman Bates did were a little different and the concept of Multiple Personality Disorder too. They both were found guilty of what they did. At the end of the novel, Norman’s personality was totally changed into his mother’s. He became a woman.

The story of Ashley Patterson and Norman Bates is connected to their childhood and since childhood it has affected their whole lives.

Ashley Patterson had grown up in Bedford, Pennsylvania, a small town two hours east of Pittsburgh, deep in the Allegheny Mountains. Her father, Steven Patterson had been the head of the Memorial Hospital of Bedford Country, one of the top one hundred hospitals in the country.

Bedford has been a wonderful town to grow up in. there were parks for a picnic, rivers to fish in and social events that went on all years. Ashley enjoyed visiting Big Valley, where there was an Amish colony. It was a common sight to see horses pulling Amish buggies with different coloured tops, coloured that depended on the degree of the orthodoxy of the owner. There were Mystery Village evenings and live theatre and the Great Pumpkin Festival.

Ashley’s abuse story began when she was six- year old. She was in London. She was in her bed when her father came to her and sat next to her and said that he is going to make her very happy. He began tickling her and she stated laughing. He then took her pyjamas off and started playing with her. He asked her if his hands feel good. Ashley started screaming and told him to stop but he did not instead he went on and on.

Her father used to come to her every night and got into bed with her. She could not stop him. When Ashley told her mother what happened, she called her a lying little bitch. She did not believe in her. Ashley was afraid to go to sleep every night as she knew that her father would come to her room. He used to make her touch him and then play with himself. She could not tell anyone and he said to her that if she would tell that to anyone, he would not love him anymore. Her father and her mother used to yell at each other all the time and Ashley thought that it was her fault. She knew that she had done something wrong but she didn’t know what. Her mother hated her. That is the place where her alter Toni Prescott was born.

It went one till she was eight. They moved to Roma, where he did research at Policlinico Umberto Primo. Ashley couldn’t stand what happened one night. That was the place where Alette Peters was born. Her father came to her room while she was asleep, and he was naked. He crawled into her bed, and this time he forced himself inside her. She tried to stop him, but she couldn’t. She begged him never to do this again, but he came to her every night. And he always said that this is how a man shows a woman he loves her and she was his woman and he loved him. She should never tell anyone about this.

The effects of her child were not seen at the early but they showed themselves when some men came near her for sexual intercourse. Ashley and her two creations of imaginations, Toni Prescott and Alette Peters murdered them and castrated them because they hated men for what her father did to her at a very age. It has a great impact on her mind. Ashley herself did not know what she did until her alter told her. She came to know that when she was admitted to a mental hospital. Without knowing anything, she had to go through a lot.

In Sheldon’s novel, the personalities of Toni and Alette are gone and Ashley manages to live a normal life, yes after going through a lot but at least Ashley could live a peaceful life after coordinating and knowing her alters.

On the other hand, if we talk about Robert Bloch’s Psycho, the character Norman Bates was born in Ohio. He spent his whole life staying with his mother, Norma Bates. After the death of his father, Norma raised him with cruelty. She didn’t let him have a life of his own and stopped him from going out. For Norman, his whole life revolves around his mother. She taught him that sex is evil and all the other women except her are whores and should not go near them. There are many incidents which show that the relationship between them might be incestuous.

When he was around nineteen, that his mother must have decided Norman wasn't ever going out into the world on his own. Maybe she deliberately prevented him from growing up. It was probably then that he began to develop his interest in occultism, things like that, and that was the time when Joe Considine came into the picture. When doctors asked him about Considine, he could not talk to them without getting into a rage. His hatred for that man was so much. Considine was a man in his early forties; when he met Mrs. Bates she was thirty-nine. I guess she wasn't much to look at, on the skinny side and prematurely grey, but ever since her husband had run off and left her she had owned quite a lot of farm property he'd put in her own name. It had brought in a good income during all these years and even though she paid out a fair amount to. The couple who worked it for her, she was well off.

Considine began to court her. MrsMrs. Bates hated men ever since her husband deserted her and the baby, and this is one of the reasons why she treated Norman the way she did. Considine finally got her to come around and agree to a marriage. He'd brought up this idea of selling the farm and using the money to build a motel--the old highway ran right alongside the place in those days, and there was a lot of business to be had. Apparently, Norman had no objections to the motel idea. The plan went through without a hitch, and for the first three months, he and his mother ran the new place together. It was then, and only then, that his mother told him that she and Considine were going to be married.

Norman had walked in on his mother and Considine together in the upstairs bedroom. Whether the full effect of the shock was experienced immediately or whether it took quite a while for the reaction to set in. Norman poisoned his mother and Considine with strychnine. He used some kind of rat poison, served it to them with their coffee. He waited until they had some sort of private celebration together; anyway, there was a big dinner on the table, and the coffee was laced with brandy. It must have helped to kill the taste. He then wrote a suicide, not in his mother’s writing. He copied it perfectly. He'd even figured out a reason--something about pregnancy, and Considine being unable to marry because he had a wife and family living out on the West Coast, where he'd lived under another name. But nobody noticed any more than they noticed what really happened to Norman after he finished the note and phoned the Sheriff to come out.

He was hysterical from shock and excitement. While writing the note, his mind changed. Apparently, now that it was all over, he couldn't stand the loss of his mother. He wanted her back. As he wrote the note in her handwriting, addressed to himself, he literally changed his mind. And Norman, or part of him, became his mother.

Bates was now multiple personalities with at least three facets. There was _Norman_, the little boy who needed his mother and hated anything or anyone who came between him and her. Then, Norma, the mother, who could not be allowed to die. The third aspect might be called _Normal_--the adult Norman Bates, who had to go through the daily routine of living, and conceal the existence of the other personalities from the world.

Cold blood murder is one thing and sickness is one thing. You aren’t really a murderer if you are sick in the head. He wasn’t given a particular punishment for what he did but he was admitted in an asylum. The personality of Norma took the whole control of Norman’s body and he could not save himself. He becomes the “Mother.

Child abuse and neglect occurs in a range of situations, for a range of reasons. Children are rarely subject to one form of abuse at a time. Adults can experience a range of psychological, emotional and social problems related to childhood abuse.

Research by McGill University (published October 14, 2015) showed that emotional abuse of a child may be equally harmful as physical abuse and neglect, while child sexual abuse often co-occurs with other forms of poor treatment.

Importantly, the researchers also say, sexually abused children are usually mistreated in other ways as well.

"Child maltreatment" is the psychological umbrella covering child physical abuse (affecting 8.0 percent of the world’s children), sexual abuse (1.6 percent), emotional abuse (36.3 percent), and neglect (4.4 percent).

Through Mt. Hope Family Center, Dr. Dante Cicchetti of the University of Minnesota and Dr. Fred Rogosch of the University of Rochester have been running, for over 20 years, a summer research camp as a way to study low-income, school-aged children between the ages of 5 and 13. Using data from this unique study, Dr. David Vachon, a professor in the department of psychology, and his co-researcher explored the effects of child abuse by examining the behaviour of nearly 2,300 boys and girls who attended the camp.

Roughly half boys and half girls, the campers could be broken down into the following groups: 60.4 percent African-American, 31.0 percent white, and 8.6 percent other ethnicities. (Each of these groups included Hispanic children.) Nearly half (52.1 percent) of these campers had a well-documented history of child maltreatment. The counsellors, while working with the children, were not aware which of the children had been abused. Vachon and his colleague assessed the psychiatric and behavioural problems of the children based on child-, peer-, and counsellor-reports.

"Our study does not compare each child to each other child," Vachon told Medical Daily in an email. "Rather, we determine whether the group of 1000+ maltreated children has different issues compared to the group of 1000+ non-maltreated children."

The researchers discovered physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect were “equivalent insults that affect broad psychiatric vulnerabilities.” Child maltreatment, said the researchers, had equal consequences for boys and girls of different races. Importantly, non-sexual child maltreatment negatively influenced two dimensions of a child’s mental state, their internalizing process and externalizing process. In turn, both these altered dimensions led to multiple forms of emotional troubles.

Emotional abuse refers to the psychological and social aspects of child abuse; it is the most common form of child abuse.

Many parents are emotionally abusive without being violent or sexually abusive, However, emotional abuse invariably accompanies physical and sexual abuse. Some parents who are emotionally abusive parents practice forms of child-rearing that are orientated towards fulfilling their own needs and goals, rather than those of their children. Their parenting style may be characterized by overt aggression towards their children, including shouting and intimidation, or they may manipulate their children using more subtle means, such as emotional blackmail.

Emotional abuse does not only occur in the home. Children can be emotionally abused by teachers and other adults in a position of power over the child. Children can also be emotionally abused by other children in the form of "bullying". Chronic emotional abuse in schools is a serious cause of harm to victimized children and warrants ongoing active intervention.

• How many children are emotionally abused or neglected? One American survey found that a quarter of the sample of undergraduate students reported some form of emotional abuse by their parents. Another quarter reported other forms of emotional abuse outside the home, such as bullying (Doyle 1997).
• Who is most likely to be emotionally abused? Boys and girls are equally likely to be victims of emotional abuse by their parents, and emotional maltreatment has been reported to peak in the 6- to 8- year old range and to remain at a similar level throughout adolescence (Kaplan and Labruna 1998).
• What are the characteristics of emotionally abusive parents? Research findings suggest that emotionally abusive parents have negative attitudes towards children, perceive parents as unrewarding and difficult to enjoy, and that they associate their own negative feelings with the child's difficult behaviour, particularly when the child reacts against their poor parenting methods. *Emotional abuse has increasingly been linked to parental mental health problems, domestic violence, drug and alcohol misuse, being abused or have been in care as children (Iwaneic and Herbert 1999).

Signs in childhood

From infancy to adulthood, emotionally abused people are often more withdrawn and emotionally disengaged than their peers and find it difficult to predict other people's behaviour, understand why they behave in the manner that they do, and respond appropriately.

Emotionally abused children exhibit a range of specific signs. They often:

• Feel unhappy, frightened and distressed
• Behave aggressively and anti-socially, or they may act too mature for their age
• Experience difficulties with academic achievement and school attendance
• Find it difficult to make friends
• Show signs of physical neglect and malnourishment
• Experience incontinence and mysterious pains.

Signs in adulthood

Adults emotionally abused as children are more likely to experience mental health problems and difficulties in personal relationships. Many of the harms of physical and sexual abuse are related to the emotional abuse that accompanies them, and as a result, many emotionally abused adults exhibit a range of complex psychological and psychosocial problems associated with multiple forms of trauma in childhood (Glaser 2002).

Significant early relationships in childhood shape our response to new social situations in adulthood. Adults with emotionally abusive parents are at a disadvantage as they try to form personal, professional and romantic relationships, since they may easily misinterpret other people's behaviours and social cues, or misapply the rules that governed their abusive relationship with their parent to everyday social situations (Berenson and Anderson 2006).

Neglect

Complaints of neglect constitute a significant proportion of notifications and referrals to child protection services, However, there is no single definition of child neglect in Australia. It is generally understood that "neglect" refers to a range of circumstances in which a parent or caregiver fails to adequately provide for a child's needs:

• through the provision of food, shelter and clothing
• By ensuring their access to medical care when necessary
• By providing them with care, love and support
• By exercising adequate supervision and control of the child
• By showing appropriate moral and legal guidance
• By ensuring that the child regularly attends school

One of the contentious aspects of "neglect", as a category of child abuse, is that it is closely related to socioeconomic status. Many parents lack the money and support to meet the standards outlined above. Parents in financial need are also more likely to be in contact with welfare services, which in turn are more likely to scrutinize their parenting practices, and therefore more likely to make a report of abuse or neglect. As a result of these factors, poor communities and poor families have often been stigmatized as epicentres of child abuse and neglect. In fact, when adults in the community are asked to make retrospective reports, emotional abuse and neglect occur in all families, rich or poor.

Sexual abuse

Sexual abuse describes an incident in an adult engages a minor in a sexual act or exposes the minor to inappropriate sexual behaviour or material. Sexual abuse also describes any incident in which a child is coerced into sexual activity by another child. A person may sexually abuse a child using threats and physical force, but sexual abuse often involves subtle forms of manipulation, in which the child is coerced into believing that the activity is an expression of love, or that the child bought the abuse upon them self. Sexual abuse involves contact and non-contact offences.

• How many children are sexually abused? Approximately one-third of women surveyed in Australia have reported sexual abuse in childhood (Flemming 1997; Glaser 1997; Mazza, Dennerstein et al. 2001). Approximately 10% of Australian men report sexual abuse in childhood (Goldman and Goldman 1988).
• Who is most likely to be sexually abused? Whilst all children are vulnerable to sexual abuse, girls are more likely to be sexually abused than boys. Disabled children are up to seven times more likely to be abused than their non-disabled peers (Briggs 2006).
• How often is sexual abuse reported to the authorities? In one study of Australian women, only 10% of child sexual abuse experiences were ever reported to the police, a doctor, or a health agency (Flemming 1997).
• Who sexually abuses children? Across all community-based studies, most abusers are male and related to the child (Flemming 1997). Most adults who sexually abuse children are not mentally ill and do not meet the diagnostic criteria for "paedophilia".

Signs in childhood

Sexually abused children exhibit a range of behaviours, including:

• Withdrawn, unhappy and suicidal behaviour
• Self-harm and suicidality
• Aggressive and violent behaviour
• Bedwetting, sleep problems, nightmares
• Eating problems e.g. anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa
• Mood swings
• Detachment
• Pains for no medical reason
• Sexual behaviour, language, or knowledge too advanced for their age

Signs in adulthood

Adults sexually abused as children have poorer mental health than other adults. They are more likely to have a history of eating disorders, depression, substance abuse, and suicide attempts. Sexual abuse is also associated with financial problems in adulthood, and a decreased likelihood to graduate from high school or undertake further education (Silverman, Reinherz et al. 1996).

Organized sexual abuse

Organized sexual abuse refers to the range of circumstances in which multiple children are subject to sexual abuse by multiple perpetrators. In these circumstances, children are subject to a range of serious harms that can include child prostitution, the manufacture of child pornography, and bizarre and sadistic sexual practices, including ritualistic abuse and torture.

• What are the circumstances in which children are subject to organized sexual abuse? Many children subject to organized abuse are raised in abusive families, and their parents make them available for abuse outside the home. This abuse may include extended family members, family "friends", or people who pay to abuse the child (Cleaver and Freeman 1996). Other children are trafficked into organized abuse by perpetrators in schools, churches, state or religious institutions, or whilst homeless or without stable housing.
• Who is most likely to be sexually abused in organized contexts? Children who are vulnerable to organized abuse include the children of parents involved in organized abuse and children from unstable or unhappy family backgrounds who may be targeted by abusers outside the family.
• Who sexually abuses children in organized contexts? Organized abuse, like all forms of child abuse, is primarily committed by parents and relatives. Organized abuse differs from other forms of sexual abuse in that women are often reported as perpetrators. Research with female sexual abusers has found that they have often grown up in environments, such as organized abuse, where sexual abuse is normative, and, as adults, they may sexually abuse in organized contexts alongside male offenders (Faller 1995).

Signs in childhood

Young children subject to organized sexual abuse often have severe traumatic and dissociative symptoms that inhibit disclosure or help-seeking behaviour. They are often very withdrawn children with strong suicidal ideation. They may exhibit disturbing behaviours while at play or when socializing with their peers or other adults.

Signs in adulthood

Organized abuse and ritual abuse is a key predisposing factor in the development of Dissociative Identity Disorder and other dissociative spectrum disorders. Adults with histories of organized abuse frequently have long histories of suicide attempts and self-harm, and they often live with a heavy burden of mental and physical illnesses.

When we talk about Sidney Sheldon’s Tell Me Your Dreams, we have to say that Ashley Patterson was a culprit of sexual abuse which was done to her by her own father without thinking about the consequences she would have to face afterwards. She had to go through a lot when she got to know that her alters stabbed five men and castrated them without her own knowledge. She was so broken. The deeds of her own father made her go through a lot and it totally broke her apart. It looks like her father was her biggest enemy and his sexual urges totally made her life hell.

On the other, if we consider Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho, what Norma Bates did was nothing else than physical abuse to her small son, she restricted her son not to talk to any other woman and that totally made a great impact on his mind. She also did an emotional effect on his son as killing Norma broke Norman emotionally and that changed him with another alter. He became his own mother. We all know that it was his own imagination that made him so. He wore his mother’s clothes and wig and looked like her. He also changed his voice as he felt so incomplete after killing her.

A child which has been abused be it mentally or physically stays with him/ her throughout her life affect her each and every decision. The child abuse which Ashley and Norman experienced in their childhood had a great impact on their mind which made them go through a lot of troubles in their life. They themselves had no idea what they were doing and what sins they were committing.

It doesn’t matter if one is emotionally tortured or sexually tortured but a single bad experience in childhood changes one’s whole personality.