Does Stockholm Syndrome really exist?

© BBC

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There are many explanations for Stockholm syndrome in academia. Evolutionary psychology believes that this may be one of the few psychological phenomena left over from the hunting and gathering era: at that time, there were constant wars between tribes, and there were also many killings and kidnappings. Among the kidnapped, most were women and children. In order to ensure the safety of themselves and their children, many women actively or passively chose to integrate into other tribal groups and survive. This kind of emotional attachment is actually a manifestation of a defense mechanism.

At 10 a.m. on August 23, 1973, Jan-Erik Olsson, a recently released prisoner, walked into a Swedish Credit Bank on Norrmalm Square in Stockholm. Wearing a wig and blackened face, he pulled out a semi-automatic rifle hidden under his coat, raised it into the air and fired, shouting, "The party has just begun!"

Thus began the most notorious bank robbery in Swedish history, a robbery that not only made the Swedes at the time watch with bated breath in front of their televisions for six whole days, but also gave rise to a now well-known and controversial psychological phenomenon: Stockholm syndrome.

The police soon arrived and surrounded the bank where Olsen was working. Ingemar Warpefeldt was the first criminal inspector to enter the building, but was immediately shot in the arm by Olsen and ordered at gunpoint to sit on a chair and "sing a song for you."

As Wappefelt sang Elvis Presley's "Lonesome Cowboy," police sent another officer, Morgan Rylander, to act as an intermediary between Olson and the government police.

Olsson then made his offer: 3 million Swedish kronor, two guns and a bulletproof vest, a getaway car, and a permit to leave Stockholm freely. He also asked the police to release his friend and fellow bank robber, Clark Olofsson, from prison and bring him to him.

To ensure that the police would comply with his terms, Olsen kidnapped four bank employees—Birgitta Lundblad, Elisabeth Oldgren, Kristin Ehnmark, and Sven Safstrom—and held them hostage in the bank's vault.

What followed was a thrilling, bizarre, six-day standoff as the police racked their brains to find a way to capture Olsson while pretending to comply with his terms. Late on the first day, they had already delivered the promised cash, car, and Olofsson to the bank, but when the police asked them not to take the hostages with them, Olsson and Olofsson decided to stay in the vault. Meanwhile, ordinary Swedish citizens watched the thrilling spectacle live on television with a frenzy.

The police continued to receive all kinds of fantastic rescue plans from enthusiastic citizens: inviting the Salvation Army choir to sing religious songs at the bank entrance, launching tennis balls to cover the vault to immobilize the robbers, and releasing a swarm of bees into the bank, etc.

On the third day of the standoff, the police managed to drill a hole above the vault, through which they took photos of the robbers and hostages in the vault; however, this move was soon counterattacked, and a policeman was subsequently shot and injured by Olofsson through the hole. On the evening of August 28, the six-day hostage crisis finally came to an end, and the police fired tear gas into the vault, eventually forcing the robbers to surrender.

Stockholm police photograph of the hijacking scene on August 26, 1973. © The Unencumbered Mind

Then, something strange happened. When the police told the hostages to leave the vault first, they refused, and Christian Enmark shouted: "No, Jan and Clark (the names of the two robbers) go first - you will shoot them once we leave the vault!"

As soon as they stepped out of the vault, the robbers and hostages hugged each other, shook hands and kissed goodbye. As the police took Olsen and Olofsson away, Enmark pleaded: "Please don't hurt them - they didn't hurt us."

Jan Eric Olsen was arrested. © Vintage Everyday

It became increasingly apparent over the next few days that a close bond had formed between the hostages and the criminals, and that despite Olsson and Olofsson’s repeated threats to kill the hostages, they treated them with surprising kindness.

When Christiane Enmark was shivering from the cold, it was Olsen who put a coat on her, soothed her and asked if she had nightmares, and gave her a bullet as a talisman; and when Elizabeth Aldgren was claustrophobic, he even allowed her to walk around the bank hall on a 30-foot rope. These acts of kindness brought the hostages and the criminals closer, and within a day, everyone was calling each other by their first names.

Sven Safstrom, one of the hostages at the time, later recalled: "When he treated us well, he was like God in our eyes when disaster struck."

According to Enmark, the hostages soon came to hate and fear the police and government more than their captors, accusing them of using their lives as leverage in their quest to bring down the criminals: "We were more afraid of the police than the two boys. We were talking about it, and believe it or not, we were doing pretty well. Why couldn't they just let the boys drive away with us?"

Enmark even called Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme and asked him to allow the kidnappers to take them in the car and escape: "In my opinion, you are just treating our lives as insignificant pawns. I have complete trust in Clark and the kidnappers. I am not hysterical. They have not done anything to us. On the contrary, they have always been very good to us. But, you know, Olof, what I am really afraid of is that the police's rash attack will kill us."

Swedish police escort Olsson out of the bank where the incident occurred. © BBC

Another incident that revealed the hostages' true feelings for their captors was when Olsen threatened to shoot Sven Safstrom in the leg to intimidate the police, and Enmark urged her colleague to take the shot.

The local government had already noticed something strange. When the police sent a commissioner to enter the vault with the hostage's permission to check the hostage's health, they found that they were only wary of him and were more relaxed and close to the robbers. The microphone on the ceiling of the vault also recorded the hostages and the kidnappers chatting and joking. Yes, it was this point that made the police believe that the robbers would not hurt the hostages as they claimed after using tear gas.

After the robbery, criminal psychologist Nils Bejerot, who helped the police during the crisis, interviewed the hostages. Even many years later, several former hostages still visited their kidnappers in prison. Bejerot coined the term "Norrmalmstorgssyndromet" to describe this apparent paradox. This term soon became known to the world and became the household name "Stockholm syndrome".

Although the term was coined in 1973, it did not become widely used until three years later. On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, the 19-year-old daughter of the owner of Hearst International, was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in her Berkeley apartment.

The SLA is a left-wing urban guerrilla group born in the United States. After the ransom negotiations broke down, the SLA tied Hearst up, covered her eyes with a blindfold and locked her in a closet for several months, forcing her to memorize the contents of left-wing books while torturing her. As Hearst later testified: "(Donald) DeFreeze told me that the War Committee had decided or was considering whether to execute me or make me one of them, and I'd better start thinking about the possibility of the latter. I had to merge my thoughts with theirs."

On April 15, two months after the kidnapping, Hearst appeared at the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco's Sunset District and participated in an armed robbery, calling herself "Tania". Over the next year and a half, Hearst participated in several SLA operations, including another bank robbery and the attempted murder of two police officers, until he was arrested on September 18, 1975. When recording his career, Hearst referred to his occupation as an "urban guerrilla".

Patricia Hearst (centre) taken to court in 1976. © Bettmann Archive

Hearst's trial began on January 15, 1976, and became a landmark case of criminal responsibility. Her attorney, F. Lee Bailey, argued that Hearst had been brainwashed by the SLA and was suffering from Stockholm syndrome—a newly coined term that was first introduced to the public.

According to US criminal law, in the absence of evidence of a mental illness diagnosis, an individual is fully responsible for any criminal act that was not committed under duress. The surveillance footage of the Hibernia Bank robbery showed that Hurst showed no signs of acting against her will; although the psychiatric evaluation found a series of signs of extreme mental trauma: a significant decrease in IQ, frequent nightmares, and memory loss, she did not show any identifiable mental illness. Therefore, if she is acquitted on the grounds of "brainwashing", this will be an unprecedented case in US legal history.

Unfortunately, prosecutors were able to convince the jury that she had willingly joined the organization by showing how easily she could have contacted the government and escaped the SLA on several occasions, and Hearst was eventually sentenced to 35 years in prison for armed robbery. After serving 22 months, President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence, and she was released from prison in 2001 when Bill Clinton issued a pardon.

Another famous case of Stockholm syndrome is Natascha Kampusch, an Australian girl who was kidnapped by Wolfgang Prikopil in 1998 when she was only ten years old and held in a cellar for eight years. On the day Kampusch escaped, Prikopil, knowing he would be tracked down by the police, committed suicide by jumping in front of a speeding train. When Kampusch was told that her kidnapper was dead, she reportedly wept in grief and later lit a candle for him.

Natasha Kampusch. © Eduardo Parra/Getty Images

According to psychiatrist Frank Ochberg, who helped the FBI and Scotland Yard identify the phenomenon in the 1970s, Stockholm syndrome can occur as a coping strategy to help kidnap victims adapt in stressful situations.

"People first experience something horrific and unexpected. They are convinced that death is coming. Then they go through a kind of infantilization—returning to childhood in a place where they cannot eat, talk, or even go to the bathroom without permission. Small acts of kindness quickly develop into a visceral gratitude for the gift of life. Hostages develop a primal and very strong positive feeling toward their captors. They deny that this is the person who put them in this situation. In their eyes, the captors are the ones who kept them alive."

This process is similar to the "brainwashing" methods reportedly used by North Korea on American prisoners of war during the Korean War. According to survivor testimonies, prisoners were initially tortured, deprived of sleep and food in order to break their will. They were then forced to complete small tasks, such as delivering letters or delivering food, to build a trusting relationship between the captor and their captor. Their tasks gradually became contrary to their original worldview, such as writing or broadcasting anti-American speeches, until the prisoners began to resonate with their captors' motivations.

As happened in the Patricia Hearst case, prisoners adapted to the way others thought in order to survive.

Yet despite the ubiquity of the term in popular culture, actual cases of Stockholm syndrome are rare, and many psychiatrists do not accept that the phenomenon exists. According to Hugh McGowan, who has worked as a hostage negotiator for the New York Police Department for 35 years, "I don't think it exists. Sometimes in psychology people look for reasons and effects that aren't there. Stockholm was a unique case. It happened at a time when we were starting to see more hostage situations, and maybe people just didn't want to take something away that we might see again."

Stockholm syndrome is not a formal psychiatric diagnosis and does not appear in the U.S. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD), or other commonly used diagnostic textbooks. According to Jennifer Wild, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, what we often call Stockholm syndrome may actually be a mixture of other more common psychological phenomena that usually occur in extreme situations:

"A classic example is domestic violence, when someone - usually a woman - becomes dependent on her partner. She may feel sympathy rather than anger. Child abuse is another example - when a parent emotionally or physically abuses their child, and the child tends to shield the parent, keep quiet or lie about it."

Others argue that the concept of Stockholm syndrome itself is sexist, given that almost all reported victims are women. They argue that the label implies that women are less strong than men and that empathizing with their captors is a sign of inherent weakness. But interviews with participants in the Normalm heist by American journalist Daniel Lang for The New Yorker suggest that this view ignores a crucial dimension of the hostage-captor relationship:

"I found that the psychiatrists I interviewed all overlooked one thing: victims might have come to an understanding with their attackers, as the doctors claimed, but it wasn't just a one-way street. Olson put it harshly. 'This is entirely the fault of the hostages,' he said. 'They did everything I asked them to do. If they hadn't, I might not be here now. Why didn't one of them attack me? They made it difficult for us to kill. They allowed us to continue living together day after day, like goats, living in a dunghill. There was no choice but to understand each other at that time.'"

Many so-called survivors have rejected the label, including Natasha Kampusch, who said in a 2010 interview: "I found it very natural to empathize with your captor, especially when you've invested a lot of time in that person. It's about empathy, about connection. Finding normalcy within the framework of crime is not a syndrome. It's a strategy for survival."

By Gilles Messier

Translated by Ishmael

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