Why Josef Fritzl thought rape was a ‘lovely idea’

By keeping his daughter in a dungeon, Fritzl was exercising the control denied to him by his mother, says Coline Covington

FIRST POSTED MARCH 18, 2009

Light out. Rape. Light on. Mould. Rape. In front of the children. The Uncertainty. Birth. Death. Rape." This is the mantra that kept Elisabeth Fritzl sane for 24 years locked up in her father's cellar.

Above ground, everything seemed normal. Below ground, it was a horror story. At the opening of Josef Fritzl's trial this week, Christiane Burkheiser, the state prosecutor, passed around a shoebox to the jury containing objects taken from the cellar. Whatever was in the shoebox, the jurors reacted with disgust.

There is a curious symmetry about Josef Fritzl's two families. Fritzl lived upstairs with his wife, Rosemarie, where they had raised seven children and subsequently adopted three grandchildren. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to his family upstairs, Fritzl also lived downstairs in the cellar with his daughter, Elisabeth, where she gave birth to seven children after being raped continuously by her father.

The two families seem to represent two parts of Fritzl's personality: the public face of the family man described as affectionate with his grandchildren and honest and polite at work, and the perverse face of the man in the cellar who was "addicted" to sex with his daughter and kept her and three of their seven children captive in horrific conditions with no warm water, fresh air or daylight for 24 years.

Fritzl has been assessed as having a "profound personality disorder". His lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, urged the jury "to keep emotion out of this". On the other hand, Mayer attempted to portray his client as having normal feelings of care and concern for his cellar family.

Mayer argued that "a man who put so much effort into keeping two families cannot be called a monster. If I only want a daughter as a sex slave, I don't let her bring children into the world. You'd let them starve."

He has emphasized that Fritzl "felt remorse for his personality and what it did to his victims". The implication is that it was Fritzl's "personality" that harmed his victims, not Fritzl himself. And perhaps there is some truth to this as it emerged that Fritzl's cellar life may well have been the enactment of a perverse fantasy life that Fritzl had to keep locked up inside him and that he dared not expose to the light of day.

He is a captive of his mother, locked in her world, with no father to intervene

Fritzl's story, according to Mayer, is that he had a miserable childhood brought up by a mother who made it clear that she had not wanted him and a virtually absent father. Fritzl's mother forbade him to have friends and beat him until the age of 12 when, apparently, Fritzl threatened to beat her back.

He is depicted as a captive of his mother, locked in her world, with no father to intervene or protect him against her assaults. The similarity of Fritzl's cellar world is obvious, although the shoe

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Can you imagine living in a house with a basement and not wondering what it was like down there? Never hearing a sound for all those years? Impossible. How many other Fritzls are ther out there? Dozens, probably. There's no such thing as one of anything.

Posted by Daniel Pallant at 12:48pm on March 19, 2009

Whatever anyone may think of the idea that Josef Fritzl was a caring and compassionate man, the very fact of the brutality that he caused his daughter and grandchildren more than proves that he was and is a person that deserves the harshest penalties allowed under Austrian law. Josef Fritzl proves the adage that, 'mankind will always do the worst to the one's that they love.' I have no sympathy for that man, he is an abominable creature that chose to act in a manner that is not consistent with the human race. Many people grow up in horrible and traumatic situations, yet they do not act like he has, I have the utmost sympathy and empathy for his daughter and 'children/grandchildren' for they are the ones who were innocent in all of the actions that he did. Please make sure that this man is put away for the rest of his life in a prison that he will not be able to escape from and will never be let out of.

Posted by nrobi at 3:20pm on March 19, 2009

Death is too good for him but it is beyond credulity that his 'upstairs' wife didn't know. It proves once again the evil of banality.

Posted by allan kessing at 10:57am on March 20, 2009

I didn't get anything out of this Freudian analysis at all. "The act of raping his daughter was addictive not only in the omnipotent excitement it gave Fritzl but it also provided a way for him to discharge his hatred towards his mother while at the same time keeping the relationship alive." Really? Delineating the aetiology of Fritzl's psycho-sexual fantasies, and the reasons he went about making them a reality, is a challenge of similar proportions to long-term weather forecasting. The psychoanalysts help us through that challenge in much the same way that sacrifices to Janus helped Caesar predict the weather.

Posted by Rohan Moore at 1:37am on March 23, 2009

Although I love the work of Carl Jung, and the concepts of Jungian psychology in general, I am more inclined to subscribe to the work of Robert Hare on psychopathy when trying to understand the behavior of Fritzl's kind. I doubt Fritzl feels genuine sorry for his victims. In his world, people exist only insofar as they advance or are on obstacle to his own internal drama. They have no real meaning or value in and of themselves, he does not see them as possessing an internal world and desires independent of his own. It is truly an act of hate, of derangement, to watch another human being suffer so and remain oblivious to their suffering, at best, or at worse, enjoy their suffering, as he apparently did. He tortured his own children physically, emotionally, spiritually. There is no justification, no understanding beyond that.

Posted by karen meyer at 3:28pm on March 24, 2009

Yet again it - apparently - is the fault of a woman when a man behaves appallingly. He is filth, and should be recycled into something useful like fertiliser.

Posted by Peter Simmons at 12:14pm on April 16, 2009