Stockholm syndrome

• 1. Introduction

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  Stockholm syndrome is the name for a supposed tendency of hostages to form a psychological bond with the people holding them. It takes its name from a failed bank robbery in Stockholm. Years afterward, the man who led that robbery, Jan-Erik Olsson, looked back on his captives and said something that sounds almost tender. "They made it hard to kill." That remark sits at the center of a long argument. Did the hostages really grow attached to their captors? Who decided that they had, and on what evidence? And why do psychologists now treat one of the most famous labels in popular psychology with deep suspicion?

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• 2. Six Days in Kreditbanken

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  Kreditbanken, one of the largest banks in Stockholm, was the target when Jan-Erik Olsson, a convict on parole, attempted a robbery in 1973. It failed. Olsson instead took four employees hostage, three women and one man. He bargained for the release of his friend Clark Olofsson from prison, so that Olofsson could assist him. The captives were held from the 23rd to the 28th of August 1973, in one of the bank's vaults.

  Olsson later said in an interview that he could easily have killed the hostages at the start. As the days passed, he explained, it became harder, because he developed an emotional bond with them. He described the forced closeness, living together day after day like goats in filth, with nothing to do but get to know one another.

  One of the hostages, Kristin Enmark, told a very different story about who posed the greater danger. In her account, the authorities were careless, and their first approach to the robbers almost compromised the hostages' safety. She blamed Sweden's prime minister, Olof Palme, for endangering their lives. Palme believed that if Olsson saw a close relative, he might agree to surrender the hostages.

  The police then made a careless mistake. They misidentified Olsson and sent a 16-year-old boy, unrelated to him, into the bank. The confusion that followed ended with Olsson firing rounds at the boy, who barely escaped. Olsson grew far more agitated afterward. Enmark and the other three hostages came to fear that police incompetence was as likely to kill them as the robbers were.

  Enmark was granted a telephone call with Palme during the siege. She reported that he told her the government would not negotiate with criminals. In the end, she said she was more afraid of the police, whose attitude seemed a larger and more direct threat to her life than the robbers. Enmark would spend decades insisting that she felt no affinity for her captors and had done only what it took to stay alive.

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• 3. Naming the Syndrome

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  Nils Bejerot, a Swedish criminologist and psychiatrist, never met, spoke to, or corresponded with any of the hostages, during the siege or after it. Even so, the Stockholm police asked him for help in analyzing the victims' reactions and their status as hostages. Speaking on a news cast after the captives were freed, Bejerot described their behavior as the result of being brainwashed by their captors. In effect, he had diagnosed them with a condition he invented.

  He called it Norrmalmstorgssyndromet, after Norrmalmstorg Square, where the attempted robbery took place. The Swedish word means "The Norrmalm Square syndrome." Outside Sweden, the label later became known as Stockholm syndrome.

  In 1980, the psychiatrist Frank Ochberg wrote about the hostages held in the American embassy in Tehran. He suggested that transference, a shift of feeling from one person onto another, might help in managing hostage situations. His essay carried the term out of a Swedish newscast and toward the practical work of negotiators.

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• 4. Patty Hearst

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  Patty Hearst, granddaughter of the publisher William Randolph Hearst, was taken and held hostage in 1974 by the Symbionese Liberation Army, which the source calls "an urban guerrilla group." Recordings captured her denouncing her family and the police under a new name, "Tania." She was later seen working with the group to rob banks in San Francisco. She also publicly asserted "sympathetic feelings" toward the group and its pursuits.

  After her arrest in 1975, a defense built on the idea that she had bonded with her captors failed in court. This frustrated her defense lawyer, F. Lee Bailey. The Stockholm robbery was so recent that the term was not yet in use. Her seven-year prison sentence was later commuted. President Bill Clinton eventually pardoned her, after being informed that she had not been acting of her own free will.

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• 5. The Checklist

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  Three signs define Stockholm syndrome, and the label applies when any of them appears alone or when they appear together. The first is negative feeling from hostages toward law enforcement and other authorities. The second is positive feeling from hostages toward their captor. The third is positive feeling that the captor returns to the hostages.

  The idea is paradoxical, because the warmth a captive feels runs opposite to the fear an onlooker would expect. It is said to be more likely when hostages are kept together and are not physically abused.

  The DSM-5, published in 2013, is widely used as the American Psychiatric Association's classification system for psychological disorders. Stockholm syndrome has never been included in any edition of the manual. Many people believe it falls under trauma bonding or post-traumatic stress disorder. Psychologists generally consider the evidence for it dubious or nonexistent, and many famous examples are partly or entirely fabricated. That includes many details of the 1973 robbery itself.

  Two researchers, Robbins and Anthony, offered an explanation in 1982 for how such a shaky idea spread so quickly.

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• 6. Counting the Cases

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  Robbins and Anthony had previously studied a condition similar to Stockholm syndrome, which they called destructive cult disorder. In their 1982 study, they observed that the 1970s were full of anxiety about the risks of brainwashing. They argued that media attention to brainwashing in that decade made the public quick to accept Stockholm syndrome as a real psychological condition.

  A 1999 FBI law enforcement bulletin examined more than 1,200 hostage incidents. It found that 8% of kidnapping victims showed signs of the syndrome. Excluding victims whose only sign was negative feeling toward law enforcement, the figure fell to 5%. An earlier survey of 600 police agencies, run by the FBI and the University of Vermont in 1989, found not one case where a bond between victim and kidnapper interfered with or endangered an assault.

  The bulletin concluded that the syndrome is rare. It argued that sensational cases lead the public to see it as the rule rather than the exception. Crisis negotiators, it advised, should keep the syndrome in proper perspective.

  A research group led by Namnyak reached a related verdict in 2008. They found vast media coverage but very little research. What studies existed were often contradictory and did not agree on what the syndrome was. The term had also stretched beyond kidnappings to cover all kinds of abuse, with no clear definition of symptoms for diagnosis.

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• 7. The Critics

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  At the Dignity Conference in 2015, Dr. Allan Wade presented a talk titled The myth of "Stockholm Syndrome" (and other concepts invented to discredit women victims of violence). He grouped the syndrome with ideas such as traumatic bonding, learned helplessness, battered women's syndrome, internalized oppression, and identification with the aggressor. In his view, all of them shift attention from real events in context to invented pathologies in the minds of victims, particularly women. He saw the label as one of many tools used to silence victims who speak publicly about negative institutional responses.

  The Australian journalist Jess Hill took a similar line in her 2019 treatise on domestic violence, See What You Made Me Do. She called the syndrome a "dubious pathology with no diagnostic criteria." She also described it as "riddled with misogyny and founded on a lie."

  Hill cited a literature review from 2008 as well. According to her, it showed that "most diagnoses of Stockholm syndrome are made by the media, not by psychologists or psychiatrists."

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• 8. Mirror Syndromes

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  A hostage crisis at the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru, in 1996 gave its name to an inversion of the idea, Lima syndrome. Members of a militant movement took hostage hundreds of people attending a party at the official residence of Japan's ambassador. Under this proposed condition, abductors develop sympathy for their captives. An abductor might also simply have second thoughts or feel empathy for victims.

  Lima syndrome is poorly understood, because the Lima crisis is the main example researchers have used. Two factors came up in the evaluation. Time spent with the captives may have strengthened the bonds. Yet that had little basis, since most captives were released early. A friendly rapport may also have helped, as many captives were high-level diplomats skilled at communication.

  London syndrome is a conjecture in the opposite direction, in which hostages stir up the kidnappers' antipathy by defying or arguing with them. It is named for the 1980 siege of the Iranian Embassy in London, where 26 hostages were taken. Special forces attacked, rescuing all but one of the remaining hostages and killing five of the six captors. The hostage who died was the Iranian cultural attache, the particular focus of the situation from the beginning.

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