Hitchcock cares little about the minor springs of plot—what he calls the "MacGuffin," the gimmick—because he is dealing with more inclusive rhythms. "To me, the narrator, they're of no importance." And this narrative sense, Hitchcock asserts …, is the most important part of his directional method. (pp. 22-3)

Hitchcock's films frequently approach the problem of detachment and involvement through separate but complementary treatments that night almost be called "genres." In "comedies" like The Lady Vanishes, North by Northwest, or Torn Curtain, the central characters are a romantic couple, with whom the audience automatically sympathizes. They serve as audience surrogates in a series of adventures that turn out happily. The axe is never far away from the neck in these comedies, but all conflict is finally dissipated by the end of the film, frequently by near fairy-tale or romance means….

Hitchcock manipulates our desire to sympathize and identify. He plays malevolently on the audience assumption that the character we sympathize with most, whose point of view we share, is the same character who is morally right in the story the movie tells. He gleefully defeats our expectation that our moral sympathies and our aesthetic sympathies remain fixed throughout the movie.

Hitchcock begins this manipulation at the very beginning of Psycho. He forces the audience, although we may not realize it immediately, to face the most sinister connotations of our audience role—our participation in the watching and observing that shades quickly into voyeurism. (p. 24)

Norman's psychosis is the MacGuffin of Psycho; its special nature is irrelevant. Hitchcock concentrates instead on problems of presentation and point of view, the uncertain line between the normal audience and the psychotic character, and the actually hazy areas of moral judgment. Throughout the movie we are placed in situations that challenge our conventionalized aesthetic and moral responses. Hitchcock's attack on the reflex use of conventional pieties is basically an attack on the desire of the audience to deny responsibility and assert complete detachment. The viewer who wants such placidity and irresponsibility is mocked by the pseudo-documentary beginning of the movie. If he chooses, he has another trapdoor available at the end—in the explanation of the psychologist.

Because Norman has murdered both his mother and her lover, we don't have the conventional out of psychiatric exoneration from guilt. But the psychologist does offer us a way to escape responsibility by even more acceptable means: he sets up a screen of jargon to "explain" Norman. For the viewer who has learned anything from Psycho he must be dismissed. The visual clues are all present: he is greasy and all-knowing; he lectures and gestures with false expansiveness. But it is his explanations that are really insufficient. And one wonders if any categories would be sufficient. Like the moral tags dispensed by the Chorus at the end of Oedipus Tyrannos, the bland wisdom of the psychologist bears little relation to the complex human reality that has been our experience in the rest of the movie…. Through Hitchcock's manipulation of point of view and moral sympathy, we have entered the shell of his personality and discovered the rooted violence and perverse sexuality that may be in our own natures. Our desire to save Norman is a desire to save ourselves. But we have been walled off from the comfortable and reasonable and "technical" explanations of the psychologist. The impact that Psycho has upon us shows how deeply we've been implicated. (p. 27)