ABSTRACT
In the sixth and last (also added — excessive) chapter of Enjoy Your Symptom! Slavoj Žižek (2001) makes the excellent claim that if architect Frank Gehry had designed the Bates Motel from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), the resulting structure of molten modernist and postmodernist forces would have obviated the violence of Norman Bates, who is torn by an embodied conflict between tradition and heimlichkeit in the Gothic (vertical) house of his mother and capital venture and independence in the mid-century (horizontal) motel. In this paper I will pursue this figuring of conflict, not just in Gehry's architecture or even in architecture, but, with Žižek, in the many aspects of the symbolic order(s) established by Lacan's ‘big Other’.
