Stockholm Syndrome

The Stockholm syndrome is a common psychological response that occurs among hostages, as well as other captives, wherein the captive begins to identify closely with the captors and their agenda and demands.

The name of the syndrome refers to a botched bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden. In August 1973, two men held four bank employees of Sveriges Kreditbank in an 11-foot by 47-foot bank vault for six days. During the siege, one female captive initiated sexual relations with her captor. Their relationship persisted after the bank robber was tried and convicted.

Stories of this seemingly incongruous bond between captive and captor resurfaced repeatedly in subsequent hostage situations. The most infamous case is that of Patricia Hearst. In 1974, 10 weeks after being taken hostage by the Symbionese Liberation Army, Hearst helped her kidnappers rob a California bank and reportedly became the lover of one of the kidnappers.

During the hostage crises in Iran and Lebanon, the Stockholm syndrome worked its way into the public imagination. The syndrome was cited when the hostages from TWA Flight 847, upon their release, were openly sympathetic to the demands of their kidnappers. Fellow Lebanon hostages believed that Terry Anderson, Terry Waite, and Thomas Sutherland all suffered from the syndrome when, upon their release, they claimed they had been treated well by their captors, though they had often been held in solitary confinement, chained up in small, unclean cells. Similar responses were exhibited by the hostages held at the Japanese embassy in Peru in 1996, and by two European women who were held hostage for 71 days in Costa Rica that same year.

Psychologists who have studied the syndrome believe the bond is initially created when a captor threatens a captive's life, deliberates, and then chooses to not kill the captive. The captive's relief at the removal of the death threat is transposed into feelings of gratitude toward the captor for giving him or her life. In nearly all cases, the victim is also unable to escape and is isolated from the outside world. As the Stockholm bank robbery incident proves, it takes only three to four days for this bond to cement, proving that, early on, the victim's need to survive trumps the urge to hate the person who created the situation.

The survival instinct is at the heart of the Stockholm syndrome. Victims live in enforced dependence and interpret rare or small acts of kindness in the midst of horrible conditions as good treatment. They often become hypervigilant to the needs and demands of their captors, making psychological links between the captors’ happiness and their own. Indeed, the syndrome is marked not only by a positive bond between captive and captor, but also by a negative attitude on behalf of the captive toward authorities who threaten the captor-captive relationship. The negative attitude is especially powerful when the hostage is of no use to the captors except as leverage against a third party, as has often been the case with political hostages.

By the 1990s, psychologists expanded their understanding of the Stockholm syndrome from hostages to other groups, including battered women, concentration camp prisoners, cult members, prisoners of war, procured prostitutes, incest victims, and abused children. Over time, however, the term has lost some of its initial significance. Twenty years after the term was coined, it has been employed to describe situations as varied as Patty Hearst's kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974, Arab-Israel relations, and, cynically, the response of moviegoing audiences to a season of bad movies.

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