To the annals of human depravity we have now added Josef Fritzl: the man who gave concrete shape to the incestuous unconscious. He fathered seven children in his own image through the quasi-mythical act of raping his daughter. One died in infancy; three joined the upper world of bourgeois Amstetten; the other three were consigned to the cellar below. For 24 years in this self-created underworld, Fritzl enjoyed the power of Hades. "The cellar of my house belonged to me alone," he told his lawyer. "It was my kingdom, to which only I had access."
As media commentators have sought to explain the ghoul of Amstetten, they have split between three types of analysis: the psychiatric, the theological and the cultural. The man is insane; or he is evil; or he is an incarnation of the pathology that begot Hitler and the idea of consigning a race of people to cellars. Though contradictory, these three tropes have a common objective: to keep Josef Fritzl at a safe distance from humanity.
Yet the anxiety of this case lies in its sinister ability to draw us in empathically. There are those pictures of the narrow entrance beckoning down to the cellar, the neat toilet facilities, the children's poignant drawings. There are haunting details: the airlessness of the space, Elisabeth teaching her pale offspring to speak, the underground family dinners, the patriarch in the bed. All of us can imagine family life and, in the creepiest possible sense, Fritzl was a family man.
"There are things that you just don't want to see," a policeman said after examining the cellar. Could it be that the most terrible things to be found inside Fritzl's narcissistic nightmare were in fact the replicas of ordinary domestic life?
The insanity explanation—a radical distortion of moral, social and cognitive order—is perhaps the most comforting and it is possible to examine it. We have Fritzl's initial explanations on record because his lawyer has released them to make a case that his client is unfit to stand trial. The paradox here is that Fritzl's statements thus far released have been strikingly coherent.
Fritzl acknowledges raping and tormenting Elisabeth, knows he will be viewed as a "beast," and hasn't attempted to justify his crimes by some mad standard of his own. He denies raping Elisabeth when she was 11, declaring that it would be abhorrent to do such a thing to a child. This may be a lie, but it is one that shows him seeking to be viewed within some framework of moral judgement. He has even provided a cod psychology of his own development, including hatred of his father, sexual obsession with his mother (which he says he "suppressed") and the idea that he wanted a large family to compensate for being an only child. "Where there is a law, there is a wish," is the Freudian formulation. Fritzl himself has made a similar remark: "I knew that Elisabeth did not want the things I did to her. I knew that I was hurting her. But the urge finally to be able to taste the forbidden fruit was too strong."
If what we want to find is a deranged and delusional maniac, Fritzl eludes us. It is fairly clear that he is not suffering from a schizophrenic, manic or depressive psychosis—so-called "Axis I" illnesses that mark consciousness-altering breaks in a person's mental functioning. He hasn't claimed, like Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire ripper, to hear voices or commands. If he is to be considered insane, it must be in the terms of a different category: that of the psychopath.
In psychiatric terms, psychopathy is distinguished as an "Axis II" type of condition, meaning it is not an emerging illness of the mind so much as an enduring trait of personality—one that is either genetically innate, or has formed so deep and early in a person's development that it becomes fixed. How it occurs is as mysterious as the formation of character itself, and is defined by extreme narcissism, callousness and lack of empathy.
Fritzl clearly fits some features of psychopathy, such as grandiosity, manipulation and criminal versatility. Others he seems to contradict. Is he, for example, "incapable of remorse" or of "taking responsibility"? These are two important features in the psychopathic profile, but Fritzl has already declared that he wants to pay for his crimes and even to find "redemption." And anyway, rather than viewing him as a medical category, wouldn't people prefer that he be punished as the free agent of his depravity?
The irony here is that under Austrian law, the 73-year-old Fritzl would get a longer sentence if found guilty of the murder of his infant son than for what really horrifies people: the incestuous creation and incarceration of his family. And ultimately, there is nothing in psychiatry or law or culture which is precisely commensurate to that. Incest breaks down definitions of the individual and the social order necessary for moral judgement.
Was Elisabeth's relationship to her father, over 24 years, simply that of a slave? He forced her to become mother to their children, and, as her teeth rotted and her hair turned white, she behaved like one, loving and protecting them. Donations have been flooding in to lend support to Fritzl's innocent victims. We think of the children to gain moral purchase. We hope for their "recovery." Yet, more than other children, they are made of the same stuff as their father.
