Becoming the Devouring Mother: The Psychology of Netflix's Ed Gein
The psyche’s will to survive endures, even when survival demands accommodation with horror itself.
Like many others, I’ve been swept up in the fascination surrounding Monster: The Ed Gein Story, now streaming among Netflix’s top titles. My reflections here are not based on clinical research or direct study, but simply on my viewership of the series and my own attempt to understand the psyche it portrays. I’m aware that Netflix’s dramatization may diverge from the historical record; what follows is an analysis of the character as presented in the series, not a definitive statement on the real Ed Gein.
True-crime stories tend to fixate on the grisly and the grotesque, but what lingers with me are the psychological forces that drive a person to such acts—the unbearable bind between love, dependency, and annihilation.
The Mother’s Wound
Ed Gein’s pathology cannot be understood apart from his mother’s. Augusta’s disillusionment with her husband—an embittered alcoholic who embodied, for her, the failure and corruption of men—spread outward until it infected her worldview entirely. All masculinity came to represent betrayal, appetite, and moral decay. Having turned away from her husband in disgust, she turned to her sons for the intimacy she could no longer find in adult love.
But the devotion she demanded was not reciprocal; it was redemptive. Her sons, and Ed especially, were conscripted to compensate for her heartbreak. The cost of that role was the foreclosure of Ed’s development into a separate, differentiated man. His very independence would have symbolized another betrayal—another man abandoning her for the world beyond her control.
To reinforce this arrangement, Augusta discredited both sides of heterosexual union. Men were weak, lustful, and corruptible; women were Jezebels, Pandoras, whores—the sources of temptation and downfall. This moralistic disparagement served a psychological purpose: it discredited the main attraction of differentiated manhood—the ability to find a mate. By rendering both sexes contemptible, she foreclosed Ed’s desire to join the adult world, ensuring that his attachment to her remained unchallenged.
For Augusta, it was imperative that Ed never become a man, because manhood was synonymous with her own abandonment and victimization. To protect herself from a second heartbreak, she sacrificed his becoming, making the foreclosure of vitality and independent manhood the price of love.
Engulfment and the Death of the Masculine
As the second-born son of a bitter, despairing mother, Gein seemed destined to occupy an impossible role: to prop up her disillusionment, to keep her intact. When a mother’s pain becomes a son’s responsibility, individuality withers. To separate is betrayal; to remain fused is psychic death.
The series portrays that Ed killed his brother, Henry—and if true, this act likely represents a desperate attempt to neutralize and discredit Henry’s healthier example of differentiation. Henry was willing to name their mother’s dysfunction plainly, to see her as human rather than holy. For Ed, this was intolerable. His brother’s rebellion exposed the implicit call to action—the invitation to overthrow guilt and individuate—a task too fraught with danger for Ed’s psyche to bear.
After Henry’s death, Ed was left as both heir and caretaker, charged with preserving the very figure who consumed him. By keeping her alive and intact, even after her physical demise, he honored the psyche’s internal promise never to let her fall—a task he upheld beyond the grave. His later acts can be seen as the twisted fulfillment of that early mandate: to preserve her form so she could never truly die, and with her, the fragile illusion of his own existence.
Idealization: The First Defense
Long before his later acts took form, Ed Gein’s psychic survival depended on preserving an impossible image of his mother. The defense of idealization—the transformation of a flawed, frightening caregiver into a figure of moral perfection—became the foundation of his inner world. For the young Ed, this was not a matter of reverence but of survival. To acknowledge her cruelty would have meant risking unbearable rage and grief and thus her alienation—and no child can afford to alienate a caregiver, no matter how abusive. The mere possibility of losing her love, or provoking her withdrawal, was tantamount to annihilation. To stay alive within her orbit, he had to exalt her. It was the only way to make intolerable love livable.
Augusta Gein’s rigid, punitive moralism created a world in which Ed’s ordinary human impulses—curiosity, sexuality, anger—were treated as sin. To be seen by her was to risk condemnation; her gaze did not merely disapprove, it annihilated. In her presence, his natural vitality became evidence of wickedness, and his sense of inherent goodness was steadily stripped away.
Caught between devotion and terror, he faced an impossible conflict: he needed her love to survive, yet that love arrived bound in judgment. Unable to tolerate the dissonance, his psyche performed an unconscious maneuver: if she is perfect, then her rejection of me is justified, and the shame belongs to me. By idealizing her, he preserved her love in fantasy while absorbing the blame himself. She ceased to be a flawed human mother and became instead a saintly moral arbiter, while he took his place as her unworthy worshiper.
In this arrangement, proximity to the idealized object itself became the compensation for shame. For Ed, closeness to the sainted mother offered a borrowed sense of purity—his only protection against the intolerable awareness of his own supposed defectiveness.
“It is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil. A sinner in a world ruled by God may be bad; but there is always a certain sense of security to be derived from the fact that the world around is good.”
But idealization could not hold forever. Once the mother’s sainthood began to crack under the strain of Ed’s own needs and impulses, new defenses rushed in to repair it. The idealized image was too brittle to contain his dependency and fear, so he drew her inward through introjection—installing her voice as his own conscience, ever vigilant, so that he might monitor himself and never again provoke her wrath. In doing so, he hoped to prevent the reawakening of emotions—anger, betrayal, grief—that threatened to shatter the idealized image on which his psychic and, in childhood, even physical safety depended. Yet this inner watchfulness did not protect him; it only made her condemnation inescapable. To escape that internal persecution, his psyche took the final step: identification. If he could not quiet her voice, he would become it. Thus the defensive chain unfolded—idealization to preserve love, introjection to preserve safety, and identification to preserve life itself.
Identification: Becoming the Source of Power
Faced with engulfment, Gein appears to have sought safety through identification: “If I become Mother, her power dwells within me rather than outside.” The now-infamous “woman suit” can be understood as a concrete enactment of this fantasy—a magical attempt to internalize the devouring force that once threatened him. By donning her form, he keeps her alive and transforms passivity into possession.
Yet the “suit” also confirms his inner experience: his very being is encased in hers. It is not disguise but revelation—a signal and a defense. As signal, it externalizes his psychic reality: that he exists only through her, with no independent skin to contain him. As defense, it wards off disintegration by completing the fusion that once guaranteed survival. In wearing her, he becomes visible only through her—proof that the boundary between them, never established in life, could not be restored in death.
On a related note, his body-snatching—his “hobby,” as he called it—can be read as a repeated affirmation that what has died might yet be resurrected. On one level, he was attempting to keep the mother alive in order to preserve his existence through her; on another, he was struggling to revive his own masculine independence, entombed long before her death. Each exhumation was a denial of finality, an insistence that what was once buried—maternal or masculine—could still be reclaimed through possession.
It is surely ironic that some of Gein’s ghastliest crimes—his body-snatching—also represent the last flicker of psychological health within him: a twisted expression of the inextinguishable hope for the renewal of what had died in psychic terms.
Sexualization: Turning Terror into Life
In the series, a hallucinatory version of Christine Jorgensen—constructed from Gein’s interactions with his psychiatrist—remarks that Ed’s struggle resembles autogynephilia more than genuine transsexualism. What struck me most, as a psychotherapist viewer, was that this imagined Jorgensen actually utters the word sexualization—a term that names, with startling precision, the very mechanism at work. Yet the series never quite answers the essential questions: sexualization of what, and why? My sense is that the object is the devouring maternal force itself—the source of both terror and vitality—and the aim is psychic mastery. By eroticizing what once annihilated him, Gein sought to transform helplessness into potency, dread into desire.
Sexualization thus became his means of metabolizing the unthinkable. Pleasure served as a disguise for fear, and arousal as a fragile assertion of agency. In this alchemy, horror was converted into vitality: what once overwhelmed him could now be approached, even possessed, under the sign of desire. Given that the out-of-balance maternal principle and its necrotic threat to masculine independence were the underlying fears, necrophilia—especially involving female corpses, particularly those of older women—was the inevitable defensive transformation.
“Sexual arousal is a reliable means of feeling alive. A child’s fear of death — by abandonment, abuse, or other dreaded calamity — can be mastered psychologically by turning a traumatic situation into a life-affirming one.”
A Mirror, However Dark
I write this not to excuse, but to illuminate. Even in the most nightmarish stories, we can glimpse the universal struggle to preserve the self in the face of overwhelming love and loss. Gein’s tragedy—seen through the lens of idealization, identification, and perverse defenses—reminds us that the line between devotion and dissolution is thinner than we like to think.
At its core lies a truth that extends beyond pathology: the human psyche will go to astonishing lengths to maintain a bond that feels essential to survival, even when that bond becomes destructive. Love, distorted by fear, can curdle into possession; dependency, unexamined, can become a substitute for being. In that sense, Gein’s horror is not alien but familiar—it exaggerates what exists in quieter forms within all of us, the wish to hold on to what we cannot bear to lose.
Ed’s only existence was in his mother, or through her, and so she could never be permitted to die in his psychic economy or subjective reality. Her death was his, for he had foreclosed—under enormous duress—on the very tasks of differentiation that might have allowed him to survive her loss.