The prosecution did not want it. They had already started their work based on the first report. Lippestad was against it. Breivik said he’d had enough of shrinks. There was also the risk that a second observation would produce the same result as the first, thought Lippestad, making it even more difficult to advance the case in court that Breivik was of sound mind, as he now wanted to affirm.
‘It has never done a case any harm to shed some extra light on it,’ concluded Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen, the judge appointed by the court to lead these negotiations. She requested that two new forensic psychiatrists be designated.
Norwegian forensic psychiatry circles are small, and many of the higher-profile experts were ruled out because they had already expressed their opinions in the media. But the court found Terje Tørrissen and Agnar Aspaas, who met the criteria of neither being close colleagues, nor having commented publicly on the case.
In addition to his conversations with the experts, Anders Behring Breivik was now to be observed around the clock for four weeks. Early each morning a team of a dozen nurses, psychologists and auxiliary psychiatric nurses were to come and spend the day with him, talk to him, eat with him, play board games with him and then submit written reports, which the new pair of experts would have to take into account.
In mid-February 2012, two months before the trial was to begin, the first session with the new forensic psychiatrists took place. Breivik asked for the interview to be recorded, so Lippestad could listen to it afterwards.
Terje Tørrissen was a short man with a furrowed brow and flyaway hair. He greeted Breivik, who entered the room flanked by two prison officers.
‘I want to inform you that we have not read the previous report,’ said Tørrissen, speaking quietly in his lilting western Norwegian accent.
‘Well I’m extremely impressed that you’ve been able to restrain yourselves,’ smiled Breivik. ‘I didn’t think there was a psychiatrist left in the whole of Norway who hadn’t made some comment, as it’s very tempting in such an important case as this.’
Once Breivik had seen how he was being perceived in the media, he realised he had miscalculated the impact his trappings of chivalry would make. The uniforms, the martyr’s gifts, the awards and decorations, the titles, even his language were ridiculed. He decided to tone down his rhetoric, referring to himself from then on as a foot soldier rather than a messiah.
‘Just to put you fully in the picture,’ he told Tørrissen, ‘I have never behaved threateningly to anyone, apart from a window of three hours on the 22nd. I am polite and pleasant to everybody. The picture the media has constructed of me as a psychotic monster who eats babies for breakfast…’
He laughed. Tørrissen noted that the laugh was self-deprecating, reasonable and appropriate.
‘… is pure rubbish and there’s no need for you to be apprehensive about me. I look forward to our working together.’
Tørrissen asked him about his conduct during the open committal hearing ten days earlier, when Breivik had made a short speech. It provoked laughter from AUF members in the hall when he declared himself a knight of the indigenous Norwegian people. He called the murders defensive attacks, undertaken in self-defence, and demanded his immediate release. The laughter spread as he spoke, and after a minute had passed the judge halted him.
‘If you know me, you’ll realise that was just an act I put on,’ explained Breivik. ‘I am actually talking to a tiny group of people, a few thousand within Europe, though that number can grow. I know very well it’s a description of reality that’s wholly alien to most people. But it’s a show… I play my role. If I say I expect to be awarded the War Cross with Three Swords, I know I’m not going to be, of course. And when I say I expect to be released immediately, I know that isn’t really going to happen either. I’m only following the path I’ve set out all along.’
‘But why not just be yourself?’
‘In a way I am myself, because I represent an entirely different picture of the world, which has been unknown since the Second World War. It exists in Japan and South Korea, but it’s alien to a Marxist society.’
‘What you call a Marxist society is really more of a social democratic society, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t mind calling it a social democratic society. I can tell the two apart. But when I say cultural Marxist, that’s to be provocative. In a way, it’s a domination technique. They use such techniques on the left and they like calling other people obscurantists, so now we’re using those tactics against the left. By the way, are you familiar with the seven questions I asked the previous experts?’
‘No, but you can ask me them now.’
‘When something big like 22 July happens in a country, it’s impossible not to be emotionally affected. The psychiatry profession has no experience of politically motivated aggressors, and that’s a major problem. You don’t know how militant nationalists think, or how militant Islamists think, or for that matter how militant Marxists think. It’s a separate world that I think very few psychiatrists have any knowledge of. You weren’t taught about it at college, and I don’t know if there’s any additional professional training available either. Maybe you can tell me about that.’
Tørrissen could not. He replied that his mandate was to find out whether the subject was ill; that is to say, whether he was suffering from a severe mental illness or not.
Psychiatry’s great weakness was that it had no response to religion or ideology, argued Breivik. ‘If it had been up to your profession, all priests would no doubt have been shut up in lunatic asylums because they had had a calling from God!’ he laughed, and described at some length how Islamists prayed five times a day to become fearless warriors, and how they got to have sex with seventy-two virgins in Paradise if they were killed. For his part, he had used Bushido meditation. He said that this involved manipulating your own mind to suppress fear, but also other feelings. ‘That’s the reason I seem de-emotionalised. I couldn’t have survived otherwise.’
Nor should the psychiatrists underestimate the importance of what he had learnt from al-Qaida, he said. Islamic militants were his source of inspiration. He was like them. A politically motivated aggressor.
In contrast to the first two psychiatrists, Terje Tørrissen and Agnar Aspaas studied the language and opinions of websites on which Breivik had been active, such as Gates of Vienna and document.no.
‘You can’t isolate the ideological, even if you decide to leave it out of a report,’ Breivik had stressed.
Just a couple of days before the trial, the new report was presented. This pair of psychiatrists concluded that Breivik suffered from dissocial personality disorder with narcissistic traits. He had a ‘grandiose perception of his own importance’ and saw himself as ‘unique’. He had a vast appetite for ‘praise, success and power’ and was totally lacking in ‘emotional empathy, remorse or affective expression’ vis-à-vis those touched by the acts he had committed.
In legal terms, a narcissistic personality disorder means that a person is criminally responsible, because the disorder is not considered to be based in psychosis. Tørrissen and Aspaas concluded that Breivik was not psychotic either at the time of the acts of which he was accused, nor during the observation. He could therefore be held criminally liable.
These two reports were then pitched against each other as the case opened on the morning of Monday 16 April 2012.
For weeks the rain had deluged bare trees. Dirty grey snow had melted and run along the streets, leaving in its wake the detritus of winter, grass covered by the previous year’s rotting leaves, and a season’s dog mess. The city had still not had its spring cleaning.