Both of them had clearly indicated that they were uncomfortable about meeting him. They said they were not in a position, either emotionally or intellectually, to carry out the one-to-one interviews with him which would be the norm. They worried about potential hostage situations, they said, especially in the case of the female expert.
For the first eleven sessions he was in shackles and his left arm was fastened to an abdominal belt. He was placed in a corner with three conference tables between him and the two psychiatrists. There were two prison guards in the room throughout. Interviews twelve and thirteen were conducted in the visiting room. On those occasions he was locked into a cubicle behind a glass wall while the experts, one for each session, sat on the other side of the glass. The guards were then on the outside.
For the first meeting he put on his striped Lacoste jersey in muted, earthy colours, the one he had been wearing on the morning of his operation, when he took the getaway car to Hammersborg torg to park it and then walked through the government quarter under an umbrella in the drizzle.
The psychiatrists shook his hand. Then he was taken to his seat behind the three tables. In his right hand he had a piece of paper, which he put on the table in front of him. The first thing he said was that every forensic psychiatrist in the world probably envied them the task of assessing him.
This produced no particular response, so he went on. He had a list of seven questions, which they had to answer before he would cooperate.
‘Why?’ asked the psychiatrists.
‘Well, I don’t want to contribute to my own character assassination, do I?’
The experts were not prepared to answer any questions. These observations were to be done on their terms. The accused insisted he must know their view of the world before he could take part in the sessions. ‘If either of you is on the ideological left, you’re going to be biased,’ he asserted.
Arguments were tossed back and forth. Breivik said they would no doubt try to gag him. ‘The machinery of power is Marxist-orientated. After the war they sent Quisling’s justice minister to the madhouse.’ Breivik repeated that he had to find out what they stood for before he gave them any answers.
Finally the forensic psychiatrists conceded. They asked him to state his questions. He read from the piece of paper.
‘The first is: What do you think about Knut Hamsun and the resignation of justice minister Sverre Risnæs after the Second World War? The second is: Do you think all national Darwinists are psychopaths?’
The psychiatrists asked him to explain the term ‘national Darwinist’.
‘A Darwinist who’s a pragmatist. With a logical approach to political decisions. There are two approaches to a political problem: men are pragmatic, whereas women use their emotions to solve the problem. Darwinism views human beings from an animal perspective, sees things as if through the eyes of an animal and acts accordingly,’ he said. ‘One example is when America bombed Japan. They employed a pragmatic approach. Better to kill three hundred thousand but save millions. We consider that to be suicidal humanism.’
‘Who are “we”?’
‘We, the Knights Templar.’
The experts asked him to go on with his list of questions.
‘Question number three is whether you think the American military command lacks empathy. Question number four: Explain the essential distinctions between pragmatism and sociopathy.’
‘How do you interpret the word sociopathy?’ asked the psychiatrists.
Breivik smiled. ‘Isn’t it the same as psychopathy, then?’
He said the subsequent questions would be more personal in nature.
‘Question five: Are you nationalists or internationalists? Number six: Do you support multiculturalism? Number seven: Have either of you had any connection with Marxist organisations?’
‘How will you judge whether we are telling the truth, if we answer your questions?’ they asked.
He grinned. ‘I already know. Thousands of hours as a salesman have taught me to predict with seventy per cent accuracy what the person I am talking to is thinking. So I know that neither of you is of Marxist orientation, but you are both politically correct and support multiculturalism. It’s all I can expect.’
‘Do you guess, or do you know what other people are thinking?’
‘I know,’ said Breivik. ‘There’s a big difference.’
He said he had studied a great deal of psychology and was able, for example, to tell the difference between people from the east and the west end of town by their clothes, make-up and watches.
At the end of the session he decided he would accept them. He looked at the experts and smiled.
‘I think I’ve been lucky.’
In the first ‘Status præsens’ that they wrote, Sørheim and Husby drew a number of conclusions. ‘The subject believes he knows what the people he is talking to are thinking. This phenomenon is judged to be founded in psychosis,’ they wrote. ‘He presents himself as unique and the focal point of everything that happens, believing that all psychiatrists in the world envied the experts their task. He compares his situation to the treatment of Nazi traitors after the war. Indicative of grandiose ideas,’ they noted. ‘The subject clearly has no clear perception of his own identity as he shifts between referring to himself in the singular and the plural,’ they concluded. ‘The subject uses words that he stresses he has invented himself, such as “national Darwinist”, “suicidal Marxist” and “suicidal humanism”. This phenomenon is judged to be one of neologism.’ Such ‘new words’ could be part of a psychosis.
At the end of the thirteen sessions, the psychiatrists concluded that Anders Behring Breivik suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. They adopted the view that he was psychotic while carrying out the attacks, and that he was still psychotic when they were making their observations. He was therefore in criminal terms not responsible for his actions and should receive treatment rather than a sentence.
Breivik was permitted to read the report when it was submitted in November 2011. He said he thought they were trying to make a fool of him. They called his compendium ‘banal, infantile and pathetically egocentric’, motivated by his ‘grandiose delusions about his own exceptional importance’. But they also described him as ‘intelligent rather than the opposite’.
He had boasted of having an extremely strong psyche, stronger than that of anyone else he had ever known. Otherwise he would never have been able to carry out his attack on Utøya, he emphasised.
Then he started getting letters from supporters around Europe who felt he would serve their cause badly if he were deemed to be not accountable for his own actions. He suddenly understood what was at stake. He could be declared insane.
Then it would all fold.
The court could rob him of all honour. Judge him to be an idiot.
Just before Christmas he rang Geir Lippestad, who was basing his preparations on the conclusions of the psychiatric report. He asked the lawyer to come and see him right away.
He had sounded worked up on the phone, so on 23 December Lippestad assembled the whole defence team – four people – and went to see him at Ila prison. They listened to him through the glass wall in the visiting room. Anders Behring Breivik asked them to change strategy.
‘I want to be found accountable for my actions,’ he said.
The defendant was supported in this by those with the clearest grounds for hating him. Several next of kin and bereaved family members had been upset to hear that he might escape serving a formal sentence. Mette Yvonne Larsen, one of the coordinators of the public advocates’ group, asked for another set of experts to be appointed so that the court would have two reports to compare. More and more of the public advocates began to press for a new assessment to be carried out.