Åsne Seierstad - One of Us

The dissection was over. The cameras were turned off. It was Breivik’s turn to speak.

‘I would like to congratulate Malt for such an accomplished character assassination. Initially I was quite offended, but I gradually came to see it as quite comical.’

He had jotted various points on a sheet of paper. ‘I never deviated from normal behaviour as a child,’ he said. ‘As for the assertion about loneliness: I have never been lonely. Not capable of friendship, that has in fact been disputed by my… er, that is, the people I was friends with before. Periods of depression: I have never been depressed. The claim that I have the right to decide who is to live and die: Che Guevara and Castro killed people in Cuba because people who call for revolution inevitably open up the possibility of people getting killed. It is claimed that I have never been in a long-term relationship. I have had two relationships of about six months’ duration since 2002. When you are working twelve to fourteen hours a day you have no time for a relationship. But I have been on dates during that period and I have had no problem making contact with women. The impression has been given that I hate women, but I love women. I hate feminism. Once I decided to carry out an armed operation I did not feel I would be justified in establishing a family, with a wife and children. Narcissism: as described here, half of Oslo West would fall into that category. It seems an idiotic diagnosis. Malt has been called in by the public advocates and it’s important to be clear about their agenda of making me appear as crazy as possible, but not so much so that I am declared unaccountable for my actions. The judge in this case should dismiss all the psychiatric witnesses. This case is about political extremism and not psychiatry. Thank you.’

The next day, seven new witnesses were called, all of them psychiatrists and psychologists. The day after that, five more. Some had met him, others had not. Diagnoses flew this way and that.

Young psychologist Eirik Johannessen was among those who had spent most time with Breivik. He was employed by Ila prison and had held extensive conversations with the defendant about his ideology and his grand fantasies. As the trial proceeded, he was still having sessions with him, and had found no sign of psychosis. Breivik’s ideas were an expression of extreme right-wing views, and the way in which he presented them could be accounted for by his inflated self-image, Johannessen concluded. He underlined that a succession of people had been observing Breivik weekly for ten months without detecting any psychotic traits.

The team at Ila ended up with a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder, just as Tørrissen and Aspaas had. Whereas Husby and Sørheim saw Breivik’s references to his role in the Knights Templar as a sign of psychosis, Johannessen had a simpler interpretation: he is lying.

It was just something Breivik had made up. Something he well knew to be non-existent.

‘Why do you think he tells these lies?’ queried Inga Bejer Engh.

‘He wants to recruit people to a network, but that’s not easy if he’s on his own. And then it helps to generate fear, and he wants his opponents to live in fear.’

‘He lies in order to make us more frightened?’ the prosecutor went on.

‘And to make himself appear a more exciting person. Rather than a failure.’

When the word failure came up, Breivik produced a slip of paper and wrote something on it. He sat there uneasily, swinging his chair on to its back legs.

Johannessen cited a former friend of Breivik’s who had told the court that Breivik always had great ambitions.

‘Not achieving them, being a failure, was so hard to bear that it helped to push him towards extremism. His ideology became important to him as a way of saving himself.’

Johannessen saw Breivik’s childhood and adolescence as a history of rejection. And when he decided to dedicate himself entirely to his ideology he found himself rejected even there, as in the case of his attempt to make contact with Fjordman.

Breivik took lots of notes as this witness was speaking. Every time the young psychologist intimated that he had lied or exaggerated his own importance, he lurched forward and made a note. Lippestad, sitting beside him, remained calm and chewed the arm of his glasses.

Johannessen drew attention to Breivik’s ability to see himself from the outside, something a psychotic individual would not be able to do. ‘At the end of a day in court, he might say, “Today I came across as a bit less accountable,” and then we would see this same conclusion borne out by the commentators on TV in the evening.’

Johannessen left the witness box. Breivik had his chance to speak. He was incensed; he raised his head.

‘It’s completely wrong that Fjordman rejected me,’ snarled Breivik. He had only contacted Fjordman to get his email address, and he had been given it.

‘I have never been rejected by anyone in my whole life,’ he concluded.

Finally, the two pairs of psychiatrists were invited to present their observations. The first duo had not changed so much as a comma of their original report. Nothing they had observed in court had changed their conclusion. Nor had they wished to receive the round-the-clock observations from the team that had followed Breivik for four weeks, which were ready just before the start of the trial. Sørheim and Husby had completed their report in November 2011, and they were standing by what they had written. Breivik was not accountable for his actions.

During the examination of the psychiatrists, judge Wenche Arntzen wondered how the two of them had reached their conclusion about all Breivik’s delusions.

‘His ideas about who should live and who should die, did you term them a delusion because they are so immoral?’

‘Now I’m confused,’ replied Synne Sørheim.

‘Acts of terrorism can be ideologically justified, isn’t that something a person can feel themselves called to, however absurd that may be?’ asked Arntzen.

‘I think we take a simpler starting point than the judge is able to do. Our approach is that he sat there alone in deadly earnest and devoted years to finding out who would have to die.’

In the psychiatry they represented, there was no category for moral deliberation.

The other pair of psychiatrists admitted they had been in doubt. All those days in court in which Breivik had not shown the slightest emotion had made Terje Tørrissen uncertain and he had asked to talk to him again. He went down to the basement and met him in the waiting cell. There he found him to be the same man he had got to know in the course of the observations, friendly, polite and adequate. In order to get through the trial he was playing a role, Tørrissen judged. In the supplementary statement that Aspaas and Tørrissen delivered during the trial, they described Breivik as a special case. His dulled state was a challenge to ‘the prevailing classification systems and models of understanding, particularly in the matter of drawing the line between lack of reality and political fanaticism’. Under examination by Inga Bejer Engh, the pair withdrew their diagnosis of dissocial personality disorder . All that remained were the narcissistic traits . They were thus left with the conclusion that he was accountable for his actions.

Once all the evidence had been heard, the prosecution had to reach a conclusion. Was he accountable for his actions or not? They were not sure he was not accountable, but they had serious doubts. It is an important principle of the rule of law that doubt should not be discounted. This had to apply, regardless of the crime. That was how they argued.