Can you psychoanalyze a nation and its people? Many are tempted to give "definitive" readings of a national character obsessed with masks, betrayals, violent penetrations, unconscious fears and death. They continue to think in terms of what the trauma means for our national psyche.

And so it is with Austria, incest and the case of Josef Fritzl, who had seven children by his daughter, whom he had confined to a cellar for 24 years:

What we usually end up with its myth from attempts to psychoanalyze a nation as an individual in order to bring its problems into the foreground or consciousness. We could say that conservative Austria suffers from a psychological disorder because it has not confronted its Nazi past.