The Kampusch enigma: Natascha: a prisoner of her past

In less than two weeks' time, on 23 August, it will be one year since Natascha Kampusch broke free from her cellar dungeon after a captivity spanning eight-and-a-half years.

She is rich, she is famous, she is adored in her homeland, but she is also still a prisoner.

Psychiatrists treating her continue to fear for the fragile health of 19-year-old Natascha as the strange bond which formed between her and her captor continues to exert a tremendous hold over 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 poor of the world - as once she promised - and has been branded as mean towards her own mother, Natascha is poised to launch another media blitz of stage-managed television and print interviews in Vienna.

None of them will address the core issue which concerns those who love and care about her: namely whether she will ever break the spell of Wolfgang Priklopil, the loner who kidnapped her on her way to school when she was just ten and incarcerated her in a cellar beneath his suburban home, and who remains the focal point of her life.

Even though he committed suicide hours after Natascha finally escaped his clutches, the ghost of his twisted love haunts her still. Her mother reveals in a new book how Natascha still carries around a picture of his candlelit coffin in her handbag - the coffin she wept over when police told her he beheaded himself beneath a Viennese train hours after she escaped. Brigitta Sirny - Natascha takes her mother's maiden name while her mother bears the name of her first husband - also reveals how the clothing that Natascha had in the cellar dungeon has become a vital keepsake for her.

Mrs Sirny says she washes and irons the dresses and clothes constantly, almost as if she hankers for the security that Priklopil's manmade grotto gave her. The strange life of Natascha is chronicled in her mother's book Desperate Years - My Life Without Natascha and comes amid the teenager's first experience of puppy love. Doctors struggling to inject some normality into a girl 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.

But, like most things with Natascha, the facade hides a suppressed volcano of conflicting emotions. "Planet Normal" is not the cosmos that Natascha yet inhabits - and some of her carers fear she may never arrive there.

While Desperate Years is for the most part a chronicle of the psychological suffering Mrs Sirny underwent, it does offer some intriguing insights into the present state of mind of the world's most famous kidnap victim - not least because of the ever present figure of Priklopil: the looming Voldemort of Natascha's stolen childhood.

Mrs Sirny, who had never enjoyed the best of relationships with Natascha when she was a single parent all those years ago before the kidnap, recalled the day Natascha came to her and said "By the way, Mamma, have I shown you this yet?"

Mrs Sirny goes on: "Natascha looks for something in her hand bag. 'There, look.' 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 am happy and reach for the pictures she offers. I see a coffin. 'They never opened it,' said Natascha. 'I said good bye to him like this.' I stared at the photo. The coffin of Wolfgang Priklopil."

She also writes about how she had even found that all Natascha's cellar clothing was also still in her possession. She said: "She gave me things from the cellar to wash. Months ago I gave her the things back, having washed them three times and after a few weeks even ironed them. The last time I went to her apartment, the stuff was hanging on the clothes horse again."

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. At least that is how I imagine it."

Speaking about Priklopil in anything less than reverential terms is also taboo with Natascha, she claims. One passage in the book explains how Mrs Sirny was driving her daughter near the railway tracks where he committed suicide on the evening of the day she freed herself. "The danger lurks in every syllable, every word. Sometimes I let something slip anyway and one has to watch out for that. Phrases are the most sensitive. 'There is the railway,' I say. The rest is stuck in my throat. "What an idiot, I think. How could I have said that? I might as well have said: 'There is the railway where the criminal was run over.' 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."

Although poised, possessed of a sure grasp of grammar, articulate and seemingly self-assured, the doctors knew this was a facade. Priklopil extracted a perverse form of love from her: 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 a prisoner - his prisoner.

Natascha now has a massive apartment donated to her by the city council of Vienna, but often finds the large space intimidating. Worse still is the alienation she often feels among her peers.

Seeing young people flirting, kissing, laughing in the famous Viennese cafes reportedly 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 that 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, who he says must first divorce the ghost of her captor, Priklopil. Mr Luedke said: "For Natascha, being in love it is totally different than for any other 19-year-old girl as she missed a decisive step in her growing up - puberty. 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. No matter whether she kisses her boyfriend, touches him or gets intimate with him, she will always have her abductor before her eyes. These images will haunt her for the rest of her life.

"Her boyfriend needs to be very understanding and needs to give her the time she needs. As soon as she discovers certain behavioural patterns that remind her of her kidnapper Priklopil, she is taken back to her past within seconds. She has to learn slowly how to build up trust - only then she will be able to enjoy love with passion and ease."

Massively sexually and physically abused by her captor, the doctors struggling to inject normality into a teenager robbed of her adolescence were pleased at news of her relationship with the 21-year-old son of her lawyer.

When I wrote a book about Natascha's imprisonment and freedom last year, a singular fear wove its way through the narrative of the psychiatrists and carers charged with the reconstruction of a shattered soul: the fear that what Priklopil did to her would rob her of any chance of a normal life in the future - that she would, in effect, always be a hostage to his will, even though the cellar was history.

One of her inner circle of friends told me, on condition of anonymity: "One must always bear in mind how ambivalent her position is. At times she might look and sound as a mature adult woman, while at other times she appears to be a ten-year-old little girl. And I have no doubt that in some aspects of her personality she is really a ten-year-old girl. She will still need therapy for years to come. One must not idealise her too much, however intelligent and exceptional she might be, for she still is a fragile young woman that has endured an ordeal that none of us can even comprehend.

"Not even the most experienced psychiatrists, including the ones around her, have the instruments to deal with or even envisage the full spectrum of consequences from those eight and a half years of her life that were taken away from her."

Mrs Sirny, who is still facing a court appearance this year over claims from a retired judge that she was a conspirator in her daughter's kidnap, dismisses the accusations as lies in her book. She also passes quickly over seedy photos of Natascha in photos taken when she was just five that one child psychiatrist described as "highly sexualised".

"A few harmless snaps got a new wrapping and the present for the media was ready," Mrs Sirny writes in her book.

The writings paint a rather more rosy picture of their relationship now, one that is sharply at odds with the past when Natascha was a latchkey kid and the apartment they shared together a battleground. Even so, an Austrian newspaper claimed this week that tensions remain.

Days after it was revealed by a newspaper that the fund Natascha started to help abducted women in Mexico has only £34,000 in it - none of which has been spent - another media report in Vienna quoted Mrs Sirny as saying that she only wrote the book after repeated attempts to obtain money from her now-wealthy daughter were unsuccessful.

According to a report in the Austrian newspaper Osterreich, several attempts by Mrs Sirny to even get a small amount of money from her daughter failed. The paper quoted Mrs Sirny as saying: "I even offered to be a cleaner for her, and I begged her to take me on as a housekeeper. But Natascha told me that it wouldn't be possible, because she claimed that she still didn't have access to her money from hew lawyers."

Her lawyers, however, said that the claim was not true, and added: "Every penny was passed on straight away." Some estimates put Natascha's personal wealth as high as £5m.

Natascha's father Ludwig Koch, meanwhile, had also complained that while advisors associated with his daughter were commanding large fees, he and her mother were still struggling to make ends meet.

"My relationship to Natascha could not be any better," gushes Mrs Sirny in her book - this despite the fact that she did not even come back from a holiday when her daughter so dramatically resurfaced. "Even though we had to get to know each other from scratch, she was ten years old when she was abducted, and returned as a young woman. We both have been severely traumatised, and you don't get over such things from one day to the other. We are on the phone a lot and meet often."

Natascha has been quoted in several Austrian newspapers as saying that she was annoyed that the book had been written, especially as after her release she had made it clear that she would not "tolerate" other book projects and would certainly not approve any of them. Natascha is not planning a book, and has instead concentrated on her education. Likewise, her father Ludwig Koch said that he "would only write such a book if Natascha would be properly involved".

But then, as her mother admits, things are not always what they seem with Natatscha. Only when Natascha herself chooses to unburden herself of the demons of those lost years will the world - and her family - get to understand the conundrum of a young woman who emerged from a cellar 3,096 days after she entered it as a schoolgirl.