Åsne Seierstad - One of Us

‘Wenche doesn’t pick up signals,’ said one neighbour to another. The woman in the flat opposite would wait inside her own front door whenever she heard Wenche on the stairs. ‘You could never get away. She went on and on, talking a load of rubbish and jumping from one subject to another, especially sex – she always had lots to say about sex. She twisted words and phrases and laughed a lot at her own stories,’ she said later. It surprised the neighbours that Wenche had no inhibitions, even when the children were there and listening to her innuendo. It was usually Elisabeth who finally managed to get her mother through the front door by saying something like, ‘We’ll have to go now Mum, or our frozen stuff will start to melt. We’d better put it in the freezer or it might get spoilt.’

The rumours were going round. There were lots of male visitors, the neighbours gossiped. It was embarrassing to encounter them on the stairs and avoid their glance or pass them when they rang the doorbell of Wenche’s flat. And Wenche was always out and about, they muttered to each other. Even at night. No one ever saw ‘a babysitter or grandma’ going in. When Wenche once asked a neighbour to come and take a look at something that was not working in the flat, the neighbour was struck by the fact that there was no sign of any children living there; it was as if they did not exist.

One day Jens Breivik received a call from one of the neighbours, complaining that there was a lot of noise in the flat, and that Wenche was often out, day and night. The neighbour hinted at the numerous male visitors and said the children were left to their own devices.

Jens did nothing. He had a new life in Paris, a new wife and new worries.

One morning, a young, female neighbour heard loud noise coming from the flat again and decided the time had come to investigate. She rang the doorbell. Elisabeth opened the door just a crack. ‘Oh no, there’s nothing wrong here. Mum’s asleep at the moment,’ she said, holding the door in place. Beneath her thin arm a boy stood staring straight ahead, his face impassive.

The neighbours’ respect for the right to privacy outweighed their concerns for the children. And anyway, the family was already on the radar of the child welfare authorities, Wenche having asked for help herself. The adviser at the Vika social services office had been seriously troubled by Wenche’s last visit and judged the family to be in need of psychiatric help rather than child welfare support. She referred them to the Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Two weeks before Anders’s fourth birthday, at the end of January 1983, the family was called in for evaluation.

The staff found the woman who came along to the meeting confused and on edge. She had great difficulty even locating the place, despite the careful instructions she had been given. It proved beyond her to find her way there with the children, and she was granted free transport by taxi.

The family was registered with the day section for families, where the children were to be evaluated by a child psychiatrist and their mother by a psychologist. There were therapists, nurses and child welfare officers on hand at the centre. These specialists would observe the family’s interaction in the course of everyday activities like mealtimes and play and carry out psychological tests on all three of them. Behavioural problems in children could be the result of relations within the family, and if ‘things were sorted out in the family’ the symptoms could subside.

Anders was placed in the nursery at the centre. He was also free to go to the playroom where there were cars, dolls, teddy bears, a puppet theatre, cowboys and Indians, paints and crayons, scissors and paper and games.

The specialists observed a boy who took no joy in life. Completely unlike the demanding boy his mother had described.

‘Marked inability to enter into the spirit of games. Takes no pleasure in the toys. When the other children are playing, he operates alongside them. He is wholly unfamiliar with “Let’s pretend” games. He is always wary during play. Anders lacks spontaneity, appetite for activity, imagination or ability to empathise. Nor does he have the mood swings seen in most children of his age. He has no language for expressing emotions,’ wrote Per Olav Næss, the child psychiatrist responsible for evaluating him. When playing shops, he was interested in how the cash register worked rather than in the game as a whole.

‘Anders demands surprisingly little attention. He is cautious, controlled, rarely pesters anyone, is extremely clean and tidy and becomes very insecure if this is not possible. He does not take the initiative in making contact with other children. He participates mechanically in activities without showing any pleasure or enthusiasm. Often looks sad. He finds it difficult to express himself emotionally but when a reaction eventually comes, it is a remarkably powerful one,’ the report continued.

Restless activity took over whenever he became aware that someone, an adult or another child, was trying to make contact. It was as if he instantly activated a defence mechanism that sent out the message ‘don’t bother me, I’m busy’ when anyone wanted anything of him. The child psychiatrist also noted a feigned, defensive smile.

Anders, however, quickly proved capable of adapting to his new surroundings. After just a few days he decided he liked coming to the nursery at the centre and thought it was ‘stupid to go’ at the end of his session. He showed pleasure in mastering new skills and was able to accept praise. The staff at the centre concluded that it was not a question of individual psychological damage in Anders; that is, damage that could not be undone by putting him in a new and positive care setting. He had considerable resources to draw on. It was the situation at home that was undermining him. The general conclusion was that Anders had been made a scapegoat for his mother’s frustrations.

The psychologist at the centre talked to his mother and carried out some tests, and found a woman who lived in her own private, internal world and had an underdeveloped sense of how to relate to people around her. Her relationships with those close to her were characterised by anxiety and she was emotionally marked by depression and by being in denial of it, said the case summary at the end of her time at the centre.

‘She is threatened by chaotic conflicts and shows signs of illogical thought when under pressure. Mentally she has a borderline personality disorder and functions very unevenly. Given a structured situation for living she can function well, but she is vulnerable in a crisis.’

Wenche’s behaviour towards Anders could change rapidly. One minute she would be pleasant and kind, only to start shouting aggressively at him the next. Her rejections could be brutal. The staff at the centre heard her yell at her son: ‘I wish you were dead!’

Anders’s mother was soon a topic of conversation among the staff.

‘Even in a clinical setting, she spoke uncritically about her aggressively sexual fantasies and fears, and her attitude to the male staff was very ambivalent,’ wrote the psychologist Arild Gjertsen. At times she was very flirtatious. But he also noted that she became more composed as her time at the centre went on.

The families being evaluated were usually discharged after the four-week observation period, and were then supported by the child welfare and child psychiatry services in their own locality. The Breivik family’s sessions at the centre led the specialists to conclude that family life was harming the children, particularly Anders, so it was recommended that social services look into the possibility of fostering.

‘The whole family is affected by the mother’s poor psychological functioning. The greatest impact is on her relationship with Anders. There is a duality to this relationship, in that on the one hand she ties him to her symbiotically, while on the other she rejects him aggressively. Anders is the victim of his mother’s projections of paranoid aggressive and sexual fear of men generally. Elisabeth escapes some of this, not least because she is a girl. For her part, Elisabeth goes too far in the precocious maternal role she adopts towards Anders.’