MILTON MILLER“In many ways, this patient has lived a psychotic life for many years. He has substituted human parts for the companionship of human beings and at the same time has gone through the superficial existence so that in the eyes of people around him he appeared quite rational. This can happen with chronic schizophrenic people.”Voyeurism, fetishism, transvestism, and necrophilia weren’t the only concepts from the field of psychopathology that the Gein case introduced to a wider public. Another was schizophrenia. For the most part, however, that term tended to be used very loosely in various press accounts of Gein’s mental condition. As a result, the public received an extremely oversimplified, even distorted, idea of the nature of Eddie’s disorder.As early as November 22, in quoting the views of the Chicago psychiatrist Edward Kelleher, the Milwaukee Journal defined schizophrenia as a “split personality”—a popular misconception perpetuated by the work that ensured the Gein crimes a permanent place in American popular mythology, Psycho.
