“I looked at all the case studies I could find in the literature and in my work, and saw that for all the psychopaths, including dictators, who had psychiatric reports from their youth, all had been abused and often had lost one or more of their biological parents.”
Norma is by no means a perfect parent, given as she is to intense overreaction and histrionics, but given her own personal history as spelled out by the series, this kind of behavior is understandable, if not acceptable. Herself suffering under an abusive father, paired with a present, but distant mother, she fell victim to a predatory older brother who raped her daily until she escaped through the guise of marriage. Said marriage, proved a frying pan/fire situation but, at the very least, it gave her her true love, Norman. Coupled with the murder she witnesses and the one she perpetrated on a man who had been raping her, it’s not a stretch to say that for Norma the night is truly dark and full of terrors. She is paranoid that the world is out to get her because nothing in her life has given her reason to think otherwise. She’s not wrong to feel that way, as in this universe worry is the best indicator of an occurrence’s looming inevitability. For instance, Norma is right to worry about her son being alone with girls, as later evidenced by the revelation that his teacher seduced him before he murdered her during one of his blackouts.
This is why what "Bates" is doing with her and Norman’s relationship is so fascinating. The two share an uncomfortable closeness, a squirm-inspiring intimacy bent on making the viewer uncomfortable. But in the context of "Bates Motel," such intimacy makes a perfect, if sick, sense. Norma and Norman cling to each other like the only survivors of a massive shipwreck. The season two finale is rife with instances of such intimacy, like Norma’s loving, insistent caresses of Norman’s face and hair after his near death. The camera focused so tightly, refusing even the relief of a two shot, alternating between the two, room enough in the frame for only one pained face at a time, each murmuring to the other. It is suffocating and unrelenting, forcing the audience to a place where it feels that breathless intimacy in their chest. This bond predates anything we’ve been privy to in the "Psycho" universe before and suggests a relationship forged in the fires of shared trauma. They are all the other has, even with the existence of Norma’s older son, Dylan. Even that relationship serves to make sense of Norman and Norma’s atypically close bond when it is revealed that Dylan was born from her brother’s sexual assaults.
As soapy as those elements may be, they’re all grounded in something familiar and true: Norman is left with his champion, his protector, all he has left in this world and Norma, broken down lioness though she may be, is desperate to protect her lame cub from the horrors in the world and in himself.
It is because she’s the only one left to pick up the pieces of her wounded child’s mind that the inevitable blame for Norman’s condition falls to Norma, even as the context of "Bates" makes it increasingly clear that the parent to blame for the decimation of Norman’s psyche is not the mother who worked at every turn to protect him but the father who ensured his childhood was filled with intimidation and violence. Robert Bloch, author of the novel "Psycho," referred to a triad that ruled Norman Bates’ mind as “Norman,” “Norma,” and “Normal.” He explained that Norman was the child, Norma the murderous mother, and Normal the functioning adult. "Bates" it would seem is tweaking even this. Increasingly, it appears that the center of the show is Norman, damaged manchild, Norma, damaged mother, and "Mother," Norman’s warped representation of Norma, twisted out of shape by trauma and time.
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