This is not exactly the same as watching tv contestants and guests be humiliated–those are vapid and boring. I admit I tender this opinion without ever having watched one to the final credits; they are too tedious to bear for that long.
The Fritzl matter, though, has another side. For me at least, whose two careers over a lifetime have been clinical psychology and law, the case has about it a sense of urgency, a need to understand if a culture can be adapted enough to prevent or discover situations so unbearable, even 1/10 so unbearable, in time to save others from this fate. Or, worst case, to deal with the criminal when he is caught.
I have to skim lightly over, avoid when possible, pictures and descriptions of the place and the life and the poignantly abandoned teddy bear, designed to draw us into sentimentality and newspaper subscriptions. But I read hungrily each new psychiatric report, reassuring myself that so far, the sons of Freud are clear-minded in the face of the perpetrator’s practiced manipulation and control moves, continuing to affirm that the creep is a psychopath and not insane, not someone they will (this time) turn back onto his victims, and expunge the records.
A younger, practicing psychologist or psychiatrist might well set himself to follow the treatment of these almost unique victims, and their progress, and that would be a good thing for him to do. I have little interest there; I see their future as already writ in so many ways and the outcome of their work and their doctors’ work to be only a dismal success. And my courage fails me, and I leave that to others.
The puzzle, the mystery most crying out for solution, though, is the etiology and embeddedness of the purposeful unawareness demonstrated by so many and abrogated by none. So many who knew of what he was capable and did nothing, then later saw or heard unexplained data, and were able to put it all aside for expedience’s sake. We hear of an Austrian national capacity for erasing or burying in a dark corner of their minds the otherwise troubling signs that might urge them to help the helpless, but it is not unique to Austria. It is apparent that good will and conscience in bystanders are no protection for victims. Where, then, is their protection? Or will there always be bullies and helpless victims and townspeople who are readily intimidated into looking at the ground to avoid a plethora of evidence of evil?
And to society as a functioning machine, does it matter?
Yes, many are voyeurs. But every person who says, this must not happen again, this must not go unavenged lest others adopt this evil, and means it, is a gift from the media–the responsible parts of the media–to us, the society.
