ABSTRACT
Hitchcock's Psycho and Bergman's Persona both imagine a narrative that includes a psychiatrist at a crucial point in the plot, although that point differs and thereby produces differences in function. Hitchcock's Psycho has an assured canonical place within American popular film; Bergman's Persona has an equally assured canonical place within European art cinema. Bergman's placement of the psychiatrist early in Person's plot intimates a different function for her vis-a-vis the film's viewers, one even more profoundly open to questions because of the indeterminate nature of the story itself. But Hitchcock, as he has himself candidly stated with a satisfaction from which the darker register of power has only been partially sublimated, is playing his audience "like an organ". Persona's psychiatrist seems to be on the mark in zeroing in on the ontological issue. There is much that is of significant psychological interest within each of them that is not touched upon by their respective psychiatrists.
