Warning signs there’s something very ‘rotten in the state of Denmark’:
“Austrian Josef Fritzl said he became addicted to incest with his daughter, who bore him seven children and had imprisoned her in a cellar to save her from the outside world.”
This is narcissism taken to its worst possible extreme. When a man like this thinks that a reasonable justification of his actions is that he’s an “addict” then it’s not just a sign of his sickness but a sign that sociologically we’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere along the line. Yes, he’s grasping at straws but they’re straws that are disquietingly familiar to many.
Things that are not addictions:
golf, video games, scrap booking, television, train spotting etc. and now we can add incest to the list.
They may have addictive qualities but they are a far cry from narcotic or tobacco addiction. It isn’t the same. It never will be. And this is not a list we should need to make.
Redefining misconduct on such a grand scale as a medical result of addiction identifies the root of evil as being in the ‘drug’ itself. In turn this prescribes that the “‘addict’s’ moral responsibility is to avoid the substance entirely: that is, to abstain“.
It’s a slight of hand on Fritzl’s part, something to distract the eye whilst the rabbit disappears. It’s also saying that all this is not really his fault but the fault of his daughter for being so irresistible. Very literally he is saying that his daughter is a drug to him, and he’s helpless to resist her seductive pull. I don’t know about you but I don’t find this a convincing argument, for a great many reasons not the least of which is that I believe the responsibility lies entirely within himself. I don’t hold with the Lolita argument for one moment, though that is evidently Fritzl’s basic method of self-justification for all this.
Another very significant problem with Fritzl even contemplating suggesting this could be an addiction is that it implies he could recover from this. You don’t recover from locking your daughter in a dungeon, and abusing her for 24 years. It isn’t possible to come back from that. There’s no redemption. I don’t care how loving you imagine our higher power is, there’s no return to society. It is a desperately sad fact that this ‘man’ will have to live out the rest of his life as society’s garbage. He has, however, so completely transgressed the bounds of precisely what makes us human as to ensure that he could never hope to know a normal life again.
He’s sick alright but he isn’t an addict. That’s an insult to addicts everywhere. My conception of hell isn’t terrible enough for this man, so I’m going to comfort myself with the idea that the sheer emptiness of his existence has to be the worst kind of terror. Only that could so badly warp the fabric of human personality as to create such an individual.
A good analysis and a well-written post.
Thanks Anita =)
Agreed!!!
Studies on sexual violence have shown that these perpetrators are non-rehabilitatable.
Can you take an adult who has experienced the peaks in adrenaline from behaviors so deplorable as sexually assaulting their own child and make them “better” so they won’t do it again?
Nope. This is why I support the death penalty.
What an excellent summary of addiction CK! Although I have spent some time around 12 step groups, I have been trying to see how the hell he could possibly pin his evil-doing onto addiction! Your paragraph regarding recovery succintly covers it all, thank you.
@Ash – Well said!
@Smithy – And thanks to you, too =) Knowing when folks ‘get it’ is all good.
His lawyer said he was insane… and his proof..? Because no one could do something like this unless they were insane… Talk about circular reasoning.
Good post, really.
@GI – yeah, I saw a great cartoon drawing on just that kind of ‘Applied Logic’ recently.
He’s not insane. He knew what he was doing. That’s the horror of it.
@Fatadelic – You’re right. He’s not clinically insane but I shouldn’t like to call him sane, precisely, either.
I’m so disturbed by this story. I’m glad to see that you wrote a thoughtful post on it, and called him (and the rest of the world) out on our often incorrect usage of the word addiction. There’s no question that there’s no rehabilitating this man. But what about the daughter, those children of incest, and even the man’s wife who did not know that her daughter was imprisoned right there for all those years? How will any of them recover from that?
@Kelley – V. good question. There’s no doubt it’ll be a long road, and for the moment they’re all in shock as far as I can tell. The newspaper reports say how surprisingly normal and happy Elizabeth seems so it seems likely to me that she has yet to have a chance to begin to process any of it or gain perspective.
I do hope that she and the rest of the family can find strength amongst themselves, and healing in time. They can never wipe the slate clean but if they can even begin to find a life they want, that is their choice and of their own design then that’s a win in my book.