KEY POINTS:
In less than two weeks, it will be one year since Natascha Kampusch broke free from her cellar dungeon after a captivity spanning 8 1/2 years.
She is rich, she is famous, she is adored in her homeland. She is also still a prisoner.
Psychiatrists continue to fear for the fragile health of 19-year-old Natascha, as the strange bond that formed between her and her captor continues to exert a tremendous pull on her. In a month in which she has been photographed smooching with a young man in a Viennese disco, has been accused of doing nothing to help the world's poor as once promised and been branded mean to her own mother, Natascha is poised to launch another media blitz of stage-managed TV and print interviews in Vienna.
None of them will address the core issue, namely whether she will ever break the spell of Wolfgang Priklopil; the loner who snatched her on her way to school when she was just 10 to incarcerate her in a cellar beneath his suburban home remains the focal point of her life.
Even though he committed suicide hours after she escaped, the ghost of his twisted love haunts her still. Her mother reveals in a new book how Natascha still carries a picture of his candlelit coffin in her handbag - the coffin she wept over when police told her he had beheaded himself under a Viennese train hours after she escaped. Brigitta Sirny, Natascha's mother, also reveals how the clothing that Natascha had in the cellar dungeon has become a vital keepsake. Natascha washes and irons the dresses and clothes constantly, almost as if she hankers for the security that Priklopil's man-made grotto gave her.
The strange life of Natascha is chronicled in her mother's book Desperate Years - My Life Without Natascha and comes amid her first experience of puppy love.
Doctors struggling to inject normality into a teenager robbed of her adolescence have been pleased at news of her relationship with the 21-year-old son of her lawyer. Recently, she was seen in a slinky dress with David Lansky on the dance-floor of a Vienna disco. The pair left hand in hand, the picture of self-absorbed young love.
While Desperate Years is for the most part a chronicle of the psychological suffering Sirny underwent, it does offer some intriguing insights into Natascha's present state of mind.
Sirny, who never enjoyed the best of relationships with Natascha when she was a single parent all those years ago, recalled the day Natascha came to her and said: "By the way, Mamma, have I shown you this yet?" Sirny writes: "She puts a few pictures in front of me. She isn't generous with personal things. To relinquish something of herself is her decision alone. Now is one of those occasions.
"I see a coffin. 'They never opened it,' said Natascha. 'I said goodbye to him like this.' I stared at the photo. The coffin of Wolfgang Priklopil."
Sirny also writes about how she found that all Natascha's cellar clothing was also still in her possession.
She adds: "It must be something so compulsive, like when women that experienced something terrible and have to constantly wash themselves because they feel dirty. "
Speaking of Priklopil in anything less than reverential terms is also taboo. One passage in the book relates how Sirny was driving her near the railway tracks where he committed suicide. "'There is the railway,' I say. The rest is stuck in my throat. 'Briefly, I hope she didn't catch it. But she catches everything. I look over and see an angry smile. No one has any idea how such small things could upset her."
Priklopil extracted a perverse form of love from Natascha: he was her only contact in all that time, and a strong bond of affection was extracted from her at the same time as she suffered. So although free, she remains his prisoner.
She has a large apartment donated to her by the Vienna city council but often finds the open space intimidating. Worse still is the alienation she often feels among her peers.
Seeing young people flirting, kissing and laughing in the famous Viennese cafes leaves Natascha both with a sense of bewilderment and revulsion: she can neither understand it nor share in it. She admitted to feeling strangely isolated when she saw groups of people her own age interacting.
There was hope that the Lansky relationship was a sign she was turning a corner in her recovery. But psychologist Christian Luedke, 47, who specialises in therapies for hostages and kidnap victims, says it will still not be easy for Natascha. She has to divorce the ghost of Priklopil first.
"On the outside, she is a woman, but mentally she isn't by far. She could not interact with peers and speak about kissing or sexual experiences. Thus, she never had the chance to develop her own sexuality."
- THE INDEPENDENT
