The Fritzl Case: Anatomy of a Nightmare

On April 27, 2008, the world learned about the arrest of 73-year-old Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter in captivity and raped his daughter for about 24 years. A month ago, the “maniac from Amstetten” was sentenced to life imprisonment. But how is this possible at all – today, in civilized Europe? Opinion of psychiatrist and psychotherapist Pierre Lassu.

Pierre Lassus is a child psychiatrist and psychotherapist, leader of the French Children’s Movement, and author of L’Enfance du crime (Bourin, 2008).

Psychologies: Austrian Josef Fritzl secretly raped his daughter Elisabeth for almost a quarter of a century. She gave birth to seven children, three of whom grew up without seeing the light of day. He burned the body of a child who died after birth… How can such actions be explained?

Pierre Lassu: Incestuous relationships in which children are born are not at all uncommon – contrary to what many may think. While we do not know how Fritzl’s childhood passed, it is likely that he grew up in a family where the prohibition of incest was not adopted unconditionally. The Fritzl case is notable for the duration of the imprisonment of its victims, its technical sophistication. Although other cases of such violence show that it is not necessary to deprive the victim of freedom in order to force silence: her psyche is imprisoned. The fact that Fritzl used the basement speaks of his additional efforts – not to see his daughter and her children as individuals, but to use them as a kind of extension of his own desires, objects of sadistic pleasure. Fritzl cannot be considered the father of Elisabeth and the other children, at most he is only their biological producer. But one person cannot depersonalize another to such an extent, reduce him to a soulless instrument, if he himself has not previously undergone serious internal deformation.

Is it possible that Elisabeth’s mother, Rose Maria Fritzl, was unaware of what was going on in her house?

It’s hard to imagine that she was completely blind to the deeds she took on as she took on the upbringing of her daughter’s three children. Rather, there is a refusal to see and understand in her behavior: such denial is often found in situations of incest – as a result of the psychological oppression of the father, which extends to the whole family. Sometimes such “ignorance” serves as a pretext for self-justification for the accomplices of the rapist – only later, when his crimes are revealed. So, the Frenchwoman Monique Olivier, the wife and assistant of the serial killer Michel Fourniret, built her defense on the fact that she herself was a victim of her husband’s unlimited power. But only the masochism of one of the partners has true power in such pairs, this trait gives the other the absolute power of the owner. A person will not allow such a thing to happen to him, not being predisposed to it. Fritzl could only focus his wife’s attention on the details that allowed her to “not see”: her daughter’s fictitious departure from home, her life in a sect, letters in which she allegedly entrusted the care of newborns to her parents.

But the population of the whole city turned out to be “blind”!

There is a form of cowardice in this collective “blindness”. We don’t want to see the unbearable, for fear of what we would be forced to do if we dared to see it. In addition, our culture (starting with the fifth biblical commandment “Honor thy father and thy mother”*) is generally more oriented in favor of parents, a priori recognizing that they are right. In such circumstances, the voice of children subjected to domestic violence is unlikely to be immediately heard. A child almost needs to stand in the middle of the main street with a bloody head in order for society to intervene and begin to react!

Why, among other crimes of this kind, was the Fritzl case so widely covered by the media?

I think this can also be seen as the “Natasha Kampusch effect”**: the Fritzl case is an even more terrible version of that sensational story. In addition, it combined all our worst fantasies and archaic fears: incest; rape; death; torture; imprisonment; sect; a mother who does not protect; Bluebeard’s forbidden doors; the basement as a symbol of all our (repressed into the unconscious) destructive feelings and impulses, dangerous secrets, hidden monsters …

What awaits Elizabeth and her children? Is it even possible to recover from such a nightmare?

It’s hard to imagine. In such a case, it is very difficult for me to believe in the restoration of the psyche. Especially because I have observed internally broken, destroyed people with a distorted personality, whom we cannot help: they either reproduce the actions of their executioners again and again, or continue to inflict upon themselves what destroyed them before, only in other, altered forms. : illness, drug addiction, self-mutilation, prostitution…

* Deut. 5:16. ** The Austrian girl was imprisoned by the rapist from March 1998 to August 2006.