Anders’ situation was, therefore, quite unusual. He might not have been one in a thousand, but he was not far off. In a number of cases, a deficit of care can be situational. The mother might be temporarily depressed after giving birth or after a break-up. A difficult financial situation and a weak social network can make the situation even more challenging. Alcohol or substance abuse might feature. All these problems may be temporary or situational, but, if the SSBU reached the conclusion they did, this was because they did not think things would change in this small family, so the report entails quite an unambiguous judgement of the mother's ability as a carer. Anders’ mother could not deal with him, she felt provoked and was practically falling apart, so the SSBU thought it would be best for everyone, including the mother, if he were placed in a foster home. Even though his sister did not present the same kind of challenge to his mother and avoided more of the conflicts at home, the SSBU recommended that child welfare keep an eye on her development too.
Anders’ mother was on an emotional rollercoaster, although, according to the SSBU, she calmed down a little during the period she stayed at Gaustad. She requested a respite home but cut off the arrangement. She agreed to a foster home placement but changed her mind. She complained about a lack of support from Jens Breivik but did not say that he was helping the family financially. She wanted assistance from the boy's father but flatly rejected him when he came onto the scene in the custody case. Although she sought out help, she described the boy as the problem: she was worn out because he was ‘demanding’. Anders may have been demanding, but there were two people in their relationship, and the mother was apparently incapable of self-reflection in any meaningful way. She was an innocent victim, as she saw it, and maybe in some ways she was.
In the SSBU account, the mother appears as a person with problems far beyond being worn out, isolated and in a difficult financial situation. If her problems were caused by her challenging situation or by depression after her separation and after Anders’ birth, a change in behaviour or a glimpse of self-insight might have been expected. Psychologists link statements of the type ‘I hate you, don't leave me’ to what is known as a borderline or emotionally unstable personality. Such people can have normal intelligence but may appear in many ways like children – immature. These are people who often function poorly in relationships with their families, who have mood swings and poor impulse control, who see things in black and white, who are unable to put themselves in other people's shoes and who have little self-insight.
Immaturity in parents and a resultant deficit of care often originates in the parents’ own upbringing, as Fonagy indicated. Many might have lost parents at a young age, while others will have grown up with depressed, violent or immature (borderline) parents of their own. According to the SSBU's generally carefully worded account, which was based mainly on information provided by her, Wenche Behring had herself had an ‘extremely challenging upbringing, initially with physical illness and later mental illness in the form of her mother's paranoid delusions’. Her mother came from ‘an affluent home’ in the West End of Oslo but married a master bricklayer in Kragerø, a small town on the coast to the south of Oslo. Her mother caught polio while she was pregnant with Wenche and had to use a wheelchair, for which she apparently later blamed her daughter. Wenche's father died when she was young. She had a close relative who was disabled, which was a matter of stigma. Disabilities were to be hidden; it was important to keep up a façade.
It could, therefore, appear as if Anders Behring Breivik had a genetic disposition towards mental illness on his mother's side and also figured as part of a chain of attachment-related disorders spanning generations. His mother could almost appear as an aggressor in her relationship to her young son, but, from another point of view, she was a victim herself. Parental rejection is linked to aggression in adulthood. A rejected child stores anger and hatred almost like a pressure cooker that can burst at any given moment. Perhaps Anders’ birth triggered a depression that brought anger and hatred to the surface. This chaos emerged when Wenche could not find the way to the SSBU.
Together, Anders and his mother wandered around like aliens on Earth, visitors from another planet who could not understand what they should feel or what they should do in the playroom. They were united in a deeply ambivalent relationship, occasionally escaping restlessly to seek confirmation from the outside world, but always finding their way back to each other.
In May 1983, child welfare backed up the SSBU's conclusion that Anders should go to a foster home. At the same time, Jens got in touch from Paris, trying to find out what was happening in Oslo. Concerned neighbours convinced him and Tove that the situation at home was excessively turbulent for the young boy. When Jens came on the scene, Wenche became intransigent. She opposed not only the compulsory care order but also the compromise suggested by child welfare of another weekend respite home for Anders.
In spite of the SSBU's unambiguous and robust recommendations that Anders should be removed from his home, his mother's refusal was the turning point in the case. Wenche Behring mobilized all her efforts in the fight against her ex-husband.19 In August, when Jens gained access to the SSBU report in its entirety, the neighbours’ warnings were confirmed. After having read the dramatic description of his son's conditions, he demanded custody of Anders. Wenche refused, and the conflict ended up in court that autumn.
‘Do you like children?’ the judge asked Tove in court in October 1983.
Maybe he was not convinced that Anders’ step-mother would be there for him. The judge was an elderly man, a representative of the post-war generation, and possibly also of 1950s values and principles.20 In addition, he was going by the judicial precedent by which the presumption of maternal custody applied in family law cases. According to this rule, the mother was seen as the principal carer. The child was in practice hers, while the father and the state child psychiatrists came second. Besides, the mother had contacted the authorities herself to seek help, and, if she was so terrible, why had the SSBU not asked for the half-sister to be taken away from her mother too?
On the mother's side, a nursery manager testified that Anders was functioning well at nursery. According to a source from the SSBU, this testimony was contrary to the report from the head of section in the nursery who had day-to-day responsibility for Anders, which apparently echoed the findings of the SSBU and described a boy with problems. The judge sat in his black robes listening to the testimony of the eloquent and much younger psychologist from the SSBU. The polite sitting hid a generational conflict in which the old view of family collided with the 1968 generation's individualistic opinion that the child should be the focus. The judge also had to decide to what extent the new technocracy of state child psychiatry should be brought to bear and how far the influence of the state should extend to the family. What was a family?
In spite of the SSBU's conclusion regarding a deficit of care and its unambiguous recommendation that Anders’ situation had to be changed, the court ruled in favour of the mother. The verdict was in line with the strong position of mothers in family cases. Wenche had her revenge on Jens. The judge appointed two experts to report on the case (at the cost of the claimant – i.e., the father) and decided that Anders would stay with his mother for the time being. The report would be expensive for Jens, and the outcome would be uncertain.