For some odd reason in browsing through articles at lunch I ran across some profiles of serial killers. Oh! It was when I was reading a synopsis of Silence of the Lambs, and then got sidetracked by being intrigued in those other articles for a similar reason - humanity at an extreme of some aspect of itself. Anyway, for one, what those serial killers did was actually a good deal more disturbing and scary than any horror movie synopsis I've read, which I didn't really expect for some reason. But the part I was really interested in was more one step back from the murderers in question - the mothers.

Consistently, each of the killers I happened to read about had a domineering mother that would psychologically and emotionally abuse them, and in a less striking sense, a similarly abused or just plain absent father. So, one thing I would like to understand better is what connection is there between that parent-child relationship and the subsequent actions of the child - say, why would one killer feel an urge to pretend to be his mother (a la Hitchcock's Psycho, but in a much, much more disturbing way)? The thing I'm actually more interested in, though, is to take another step "back," and see what drove the mothers to their particular dysfunctions, as that seems like it's been ignored in conventional thought upon the matter.