“The mother and Anders sleep in the same bed at night with very close bodily contact,” psychologists from Norway’s centre for child and youth psychiatry (SSBU), reported after Breivik and his mother spent several weeks there in 1983.
The reports also show that when Breivik was just four-years-old, his mother became preoccupied with fears that her son would violently assault someone. By the time he was four years old, she “sexualised” the young Breivik, hit him, and frequently told him that she wished that he were dead.
“She saw him as an adult violent person, even though he was only a small boy,” said Aage Borchgrevink, author of A Norwegian tragedy. “She was afraid that he would assault people.”
The psychologist reports show that Wenche Behring already felt her son was “aggressive, hyperactive and clingy,” when she was breastfeeding him.
The family’s neighbours at the time became worried about her inappropriate sexual behaviour.
“During the police investigation, the neighbours also said that they had been shocked by the mother’s sexualised language,” Borchgrevink writes. “There was a lot of fighting in the apartment and they remembered sexual activity taking place while the children were in there.”
The SSBU report described Ms Behring as “a woman with an extremely difficult upbringing, borderline personality structure and an all-encompassing if only partially visible depression” who “projects her primitive aggressive and sexual fantasies onto him [Breivik]”.
The psychologists reported that she would frequently tell her son that she wished he would die.
“She shifts very quickly between speaking to him with a sugary voice and openly expressing a death wish,” they wrote.
When she smacked him in an attempt to exert control, the four-year-old would taunt her that the blows did not hurt, smiling in a way she found “condescending, inappropriate and derisive”.
Borchgrevink, a novelist, has faced criticism in Norway for his decision to publish excerpts from the reports, with some accusing him of violating the privacy of Ms Behring, who was admitted to a psychiatric ward the day after her son killed 77 people in his bomb and gun rampage in July 2011.
Ms Behring was excused from testifying in the trial this summer on health grounds, and refused to give permission for the psychologist who examined the family in 1983 and 1984 to give evidence, preventing the information published last week from being heard in court.
After Breivik’s father Jens Breivik lost a child custody case with Ms Behring, social workers recommended that the boy nonetheless be removed from his mother to prevent “more severe psychopathology” from developing, a request that was ignored.
Borchgrevink said it was this that had convinced him that he was right to publish.
“I’ve given more weight to the public interest. The fact is that he was actually caught by the system before the action, not by the security police, but in his childhood. He was within the system, but the system let him go.”
Breivik was sentenced to 21 years in jail for his attack in August, which he claimed was “necessary” to alert Norway to the threat posed by Islamic immigration. – Richard Orange