For the record, “make the audience Also feel weird” is part of why I write Norman with such an intense attachment to Freudian psychology. I’ve said before that it’s good characterization for his attempts to rationalize his response to abuse through a framework that is absolutely hellish on incest victims and people with OCD, but it also reads differently between when it was written vs the modern day. Freudian psychology was a thing people actually believed. (I mean, it does still crop up now because psychology is new and more importantly we will never escape the bullshit misogyny of the psychiatric system, it’s just more hidden.)
Crucially, people these days generally believe Freud to be a weird freak, and by extension, Norman clinging so tightly to Freudian psychology both on a Doylist and in-universe level makes him also a weird freak. Disgusting, even. And this is furthered by Psycho being remembered by its twists, such that the sympathetic antihero / twist villain is remembered as entirely off-putting and malicious. This means that any modern work usually has to move backwards, starting out in the audience’s perceptions of Norman as villainous and pulling him back to the realm of sympathy.
So the societal disgust towards people who fall outside of the “perfect victim” archetype, particularly sexual abuse victims, can be leveraged to naturally create a feeling of gradual revelation, even without the character necessarily having to change, which works surprisingly well for Norman in a lot of situations, because he’s a character defined by stasis.
Plus, playing on an audience's immediate disgust-- "Why would anyone think it's normal to be attracted to his mother?"-- especially for someone who falls outside the typical image of a sexual abuse victim, and then reeling them to the realization that he's a victim encourages an audience to look past their disgust both in fiction and real life and hopefully examine these situations with more care and sympathy.
