Stockholm Syndrome
Mike: No one has ever done that in real life, but every sit-com has featured a subplot where somebody makes an actual written down pro and con list.
Sarah: Yeah. And Ross did that about Rachel on Friends. And in retrospect, that relationship never should have happened.
Mike: Welcome to You're Wrong About the show where we set right what we once got wrong. Still struggling. I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: and I'm Sarah Marshall and I'm a writer for the new Republican and Buzzfeed.
Mike: And today we're talking about Stockholm Syndrome.
Sarah: So, Michael, what can you tell me about Stockholm Syndrome?
Mike: So Stockholm syndrome, I'm an expert on this because I've done no research whatsoever, is the phenomenon by which you get kidnapped, and you start to sympathize with your kidnappers, and you start to take on their political beliefs as your own. And so in the seventies, when there used to be lots of kidnappings, there were some famous cases of people going rogue against the cops and teaming up with their own kidnappers. And I have no idea why it's called Stockholm. I have no idea what Stockholm has to do with anything.
Sarah: When you think of the famous American cases, who do you think of?
Mike: Oh, Patty Hearst.
Sarah: Yeah. She's the poster girl for Stockholm Syndrome. Yes. And you're right. And it's a little broader than that. But yeah, the way we know it as Americans, and I think because we know it through Patty Hearst, is that when you get kidnapped you take on the political views of your captors. And she was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), which while researching this, I got to finally find out what ‘Symbionese’ means, which I vaguely assumed for my entire life was some referenced former country in Southeast Asia. But it turns out it's because the philosophy of it was that they were symbiotic beings and that was what they wanted to create in the world by doing bank robberies.
So the timing of this is really interesting. And it starts, because Patty Hearst was kidnapped in February of 1974, and a little less than six months before that in Stockholm, Sweden on August 23rd, 1973, a bank robber named Jan Eric Olson comes into one of the larger banks in Stockholm and takes three hostages. And later on, he finds out that he's accidentally gotten himself a fourth hostage, because a guy was hiding. But he has three lady hostages, and he holds them hostage for six days. He's eventually joined by a friend of his who was in prison. And so one of his demands was that the Swedish authorities take him out of prison and bring him to the bank to help with the hostage situation, which I don't think we would probably do in America.
But another interesting thing in this too, is that you watch Swedish authorities dealing with a hostage taking bank robbery situation and you're like, ah, there are various moments where you think Sweden is a different country.
Mike: I can't remotely expect in what way it’s different.
Sarah: Let me read you a couple of quotes from a phone call that one of the hostages, Kristen, has with the Swedish prime minister, who she apparently called from inside the bank. And also, the media transparency of this is really interesting because this tape, this call was recorded. And then the media were calling the hostages while they were inside the bank and then broadcasting their conversations with them to the Swedish public who were sort of watching this whole thing unfold as it happened. “It was a little bit of a loosey goosey hostage situation.” It's interesting that the first situation that allowed us to see captives as taking the side of their captors was one where they were being treated in the scheme of things, relatively well by the captors.
Mike: So, he walks into the bank, he locks it down. He locks the doors, I assume.
Sarah: He evacuates almost everyone who's in there, but he keeps some hostages for himself.
Mike: Were they tellers or were they customers?
Sarah: I don't know if they were tellers, but they were workers in the bank.
Mike: And so he deliberately keeps them. They start calling the media and telling their story to reporters and TV news.
Sarah: I don't know if they reached out to the media, but the media was able to access them and then to broadcast their calls. And then one of the hostages, Kristen, calls the prime minister.
Mike: Wait, how? Is that on speed dial at the bank, dear prime minister, bloop, bloop.
Sarah: It's a very Swedish sounding phone. Yeah, I don't know. This is one of the things I still haven't figured out, but it seems a very Swedish thing to me that you would be able to just get through to the prime minister fairly easily.
Mike: An Icelandic friend of mine was once flying from Reykjavik to London and he sat next to the prime minister of Iceland in coach, which is wild to me.
Sarah: My friend who married a guy from New Zealand, they were on a flight in New Zealand once and her husband went, oh, there's Jacinda. And she went, what? And he went to Jacinda, the prime minister. And Jacinda, the prime minister, was sitting a few rows ahead of them also in coach.
Mike: Small countries are the cutest.
Sarah: Yeah. So I think in New Zealand too, probably you just called the prime minister if you were a hostage in a bank and, you know, Got a direct line to Jacinda. And so, speaking of calling your prime minister by their first name, what Kristen says to the prime minister in their call is, and she's talking about the robbers, “They haven't done a thing to us, on the contrary they were very nice. But, you know, Olaf, what I am scared of is that the police will attack and cause us to die.
Mike: So that makes sense. She starts to sympathize with the hostage shakers, because she's in a safety situation in which they're like they're in the same danger right now, I guess.
Sarah: Yeah. And I think that's a big part of it. They are not their safety. From the beginning, they know in a functional way that their safety is linked to the safety of their captors.
Mike: Which I guess just creates a fundamental us versus them type of scenario that would of course build a little bit of team spirit.
Sarah: Yeah. They're in the bank for six days. So by the end of it, things start getting messy there. I mean, six days is a long time to be with people in a confined situation, in a vault, which is where they were keeping the hostages. And so they start divvying up chores and doing chore details, you know, having this little mini society where they each have roles. And, and so Kristen talking to the prime minister Olof says they're frightened for their safety and Olaf, the prime minister says the “police will not harm you. Can you believe that?” And she says, “you must forgive me, but in this situation, I do not believe it. Olson, the robber is sitting here, and he is protecting us from the police.”
Mike: So you can see it sort of starting to form, he becomes the gorilla daddy who's protecting them from the evil interlopers.
Sarah: I can also tell you, instead of just making an off-color joke, because my first impulse, that gorilla daddy was a viable exploitation film genre in the seventies because of Patty Hearst, to skip ahead momentarily. There were several Patty Hearst themed exploitation films playing on the erotic’s as it were of the situation. So yeah, gorilla daddy, it begins.
Mike: So wait, so that's six days. What do the hostage takers want during this time?
Sarah: They want money, and they want basically a safe getaway. And they know that if they're separated from the hostages, then the police are going to be able to take them down and they're afraid of being killed. And so the hostages are aware of this too. And so finally, after six days the police eventually get them out by drilling holes in the vault and putting in tear gas, and tear gas seems to be generally a good strategy for diffusing a hostage situation until you get to Waco. But that's a different story. After six days, the police get everybody to surrender and come out and the hostages won't let them take their captors out by themselves. They insist on coming with their captors and all walking out together.
And then one of the hostages, they have her on a stretcher and she won't lie down. She's sitting up and looking around for one of their captors and looking to see if he's okay. And they both went to prison for relatively brief sentences, because again, the story takes place in Sweden and some of the captives visited them there. And so I think one of the reasons that this became as well-known in the U S as it did was first that there was a New Yorker piece where the author Daniel Lang went and did long interviews with the captives and with the police involved in the case and got really interesting quotes from them. So you can hear them trying to access the mental state that they were in at the time, which is still more real for some of them than others. And one of them talks about, she got claustrophobic in the bank fault and asked Olson, who is the main bank robber, to take her out for a walk. And so he tied a rope around her neck and took her out of the vault and into the main part of the bank. And she could walk around, she could walk around and be free, but was on a leash, but felt grateful to him for taking her up on a leash. And she could see the police and the police could see her. She could see them outside of the building and Olson apparently didn't notice them. And the police signaled to her in some way to tell them how many hostages there were, and she held up her hand and showed four fingers and showed that there were four hostages. And she said later that she felt like a trader at the time for doing that.
Mike: Wow. So, did any of them recant afterwards? I can see how in an intense, captive situation, you create this insular little world where you start to sympathize with your captors, but then afterwards were any of them like, oh, I don't know what came over me. This is bananas. I don't sympathize with these guys anymore. Or did the sympathy last?
Sarah: It lasted. And in these quotes from this article, you can see the mist starting to part a little bit, but it's not as if they were suddenly snapped out of this momentary reality that they were in. They're able to talk lucidly about how they felt at the time and in a way that suggests that, you know, they're not doing that thing of saying at the time I believe this and clearly now I know that it was because of this situation that I was in and I, you know. And this way that people have of disavowing the way that they felt or behaved at a different time of explaining it in a way to suggest that they didn't really feel it, which I don't think has ever an explanation that makes sense. We want to believe that at certain times we didn't actually feel what we were feeling, but clearly it was real in the moment. And they talk about the recent past in a way that suggests they still understand that.
Mike: Did the hostage takers at that time have any kind of political program?
Sarah: Not as far as I know, and not that they mentioned. It's interesting too that we then import this to the U.S. and he used it to talk about cases where often there's some sort of a political valence.
Mike: Right because I can see in a hostage situation, if the person taking me hostage is fighting for some sort of rights issue that I feel really strongly about that I might disagree with their methods, but because of their just because I might start to really like them. Whereas it's interesting that this is just money. You start to sympathize with these people who just wanted money and held me captive for six days. It's weird that that would create a sense of sympathy.
Sarah: And I thought about as I was trying to figure out what this experience was like for these hostages was Dog Day Afternoon.
Mike: That's the hostage taking movie in New York City right?
Sarah: Yeah, where Al Pacino comes in and attempts to rob the bank and it doesn't work out. And he has to surrender at the end. And it's like one of those half-cocked bank robbery scheme movies. Some of the descriptions of Olsen, the bank robber in Stockholm, reminded me of that Al Pacino character, because we're watching someone who's desperate and not that intelligent and has gotten in over his head and is now this scrappy loner who is pitted against the police and all of their power and all of their firepower and all of their societal-
Mike: The monopoly on state violence.
Sarah: If I were one of the tellers and Dog Day Afternoon, and there was sweaty and competent and Al Pacino trying a little bit and competently to manage this whole hostage situation, I personally would be quite sympathetic to him. And I can even imagine a regular citizen who doesn't sit around thinking about what structural forces lead people to commit bank robberies all day would feel sympathetic to him, too.
And there's also a great moment in the Stockholm bank robbery where the police apparently started to feel concerned, both concerned and relieved, that the captors wouldn't kill any of the hostages like they had been threatening to do, because one of the hostages got her period while they were in the vault. And so the captors contacted the police and were like, ‘Hey, we really need pads or tampons or something because one of the captives is having her period and we have to take care of it. And the police were like, this is weird. You seem a little bit bonded if you're caring about women being on their periods. I think this also speaks to the time that this happened when I think the idea of a man being anything other than completely terrified by a woman's period was suspect.
Mike: So was it called Stockholm syndrome immediately? Was it the New Yorker that coined that term?
Sarah: So while this was happening, a Swedish psychiatrist, Nils Bejerot, that's the name of the psychiatrist who's interviewed on the news at the time this is happening and then in the immediate aftermath. And brainwashing is something that people already have a sense of because that's something that was happening, especially in the sixties, we were talking about that in the context of cults and that kind of thing. But the term that this sweetie psychiatrist applies to the situation, the bank is the normal storge syndrome because that's the name of the bank where it happened, which gets imported to the US understandably, as Stockholm syndrome. And internationally too. This is not solely an American fixation.
Mike: Was this phenomenon known before this hostage crisis? was this psychologist saying, oh yes. This is something that psychologists have known about for ages or is he coming up with it on the fly?
Sarah: He's coming up and on the fly and he's naming it after this specific set of circumstances where this happens, and this is where we start formulating the symptoms that make it a syndrome. One of the things that I found really interesting thinking about this is that I looked up finally for the first time in my life what a syndrome actually is because that's a phrase that we hear a lot.
Mike: It’s not a disease, it's a specific thing, right?
Sarah: Well, a syndrome is a grouping of symptoms. If you say Stockholm syndrome, you’re not talking specifically about the cause or about the affliction, you're talking about what symptoms are manifesting and the people that you're trying to describe, but those symptoms could come from different causes. So it's not saying Stockholm syndrome happens when people are existing under these very specific conditions and this set of circumstances leads it to happen. They're saying this is this cluster of symptoms that we observe and this grouping of similar circumstances, but they're not always the same circumstances.
Mike: So, what are his symptoms and what are their circumstances?
Sarah: So siding with the captor, it's not necessarily about taking on their political views, but you can see how if politics were a part of this then that would be involved. Not trying to escape when the opportunity is presented to you and siding with your captors against their enemies and taking on their enemies as your own enemies. This is not a DSM thing. This is not really so much of an official psychiatrically studied thing. And there isn't a lot of metadata on this, but we have, when we talk about Stockholm syndrome or analysis of various case histories, it's not like saying that someone has bipolar disorder where you can talk about it with more scientific degree of accuracy. It's mushy. And people will describe it in different ways.
One of the descriptions that comes up is compassion for the abductor, which I think is really interesting because I think that you can feel compassion for someone without taking their side ideologically or in a situation. And so there's something interesting about the fact that in this bank case, clearly it was about witnessing the humanity of the people who were holding you hostage. I think that the inclination to sympathize with someone who is pitted against the far greater power of the police and of society, there's something about that that makes sense as a defense mechanism. And it's something that the human psyche does in a situation where you have to, in some ways believe, and in a way that you wouldn't believe in other circumstances, that this person has your best interests at heart.
Mike: Is that what he's describing? I mean, that seems like much more than just saying, Hey, I hope the cops don't kill us. That's a much bigger internalization. You're actually starting to like these people, not necessarily just rooting for them against the people with the tear gas.
Sarah: I think we can call something Stockholm syndrome if you're just attaching to someone or trying to appease them in order to stay alive.
Mike: One of the things that strikes me about this too, is that very few sort of psychological diagnoses are this situational, right? I mean, like you were saying with bipolar disorder, that's something that you as a person have and you presumably take to whatever situation that you're in, whereas Stockholm syndrome seems like it's a very specific reaction to an extremely specific set of circumstances, that you're being confined by someone you don't know for a long period of time. That's something that very few humans even go through in their life. And so few of these kinds of DSM type phenomena are situational in that way.
Sarah: Yeah. And there's something weird about saying that someone had or didn't have Stockholm syndrome. Cause it's not something that I think you have in the way that you have something like schizophrenia, it's this much more fluid thing. And I think of it as being more, not even hugely extreme, but at a more extreme end of the spectrum of human behavior than we normally inhabit. And it seems like something that makes sense psychologically is something that people would do under these sets of circumstances where we've observed it. We started studying this in the seventies and there are cases that seem to complicate or challenge this trend. There was a case in the eighties where a group of revolutionaries hijacked a plane as was the thing to do back then. And we're holding people hostage on the ground, but they had I think 36 hostages and only one of them didn't go along with the captors and continued to make things difficult for them and would be taking photographs of the situation so he could show them to the police and was-
Mike: Oh, like a 12 Angry Men situation. The one who’s going against the group.
Sarah: The lone holdout and the other people in the group were concerned that he was jeopardizing their safety by not going along with the captors, but also I think saw him as kind of a narc.
Mike: So the bank robbery happens, this psychologist comes up with this term, the term gets sort of popularized, and then the New Yorker does this thing that gets a lot of American attention. All of this is before Patty Hearst, right?
Sarah: I think the New Yorker article comes out after Patty Hearst has been kidnapped, but before we reckon with Patty Hearst, because to me, one of the really interesting things about Patty Harris and that I also didn't realize before looking at this is that the Patty Hearst saga went on for years. She was kidnapped on February 4th, 1974. She was 19 years old, which I would like to emphasize because you know, think about being 19 and then think about being kidnapped and think about those two things happening at once.
Mike: So who is Patty Hearst?
Sarah: Patty Hearst is the beautiful heiress to the Hearst fortune, and a member of a descendant of William Randolph Hearst.
Mike: Newspaper guy, so worth the modern equivalent of billions. So, she inherits all this wealth and she's famous before the kidnapping.
Sarah: I think she was famous in that way, before the kidnapping. She was a student at Berkeley. She was 19. She was displaying some hippie tendencies, but not to an extreme degree. She was a well-behaved daughter of a rich family. And I think that was the really shocking thing about this. Not that it happened to someone who has already particularly well-known, and I think it's important that she becomes iconic only after she gets kidnapped, because then there's no real previous image of her for what happened to contradict in a way that would have been more complicated if she'd been in the American mind for a while, but she's a daughter of privilege. She has everything she could possibly want or need. She's engaged and she's in line for this fortune and she's very pretty, which I think is an interesting component of how all this played out. So she's kidnapped from her home in California by the Symbionese Liberation Army, which is a very grandiose term because they only have a handful of members. They're really a Symbionese liberation-
Mike: Minivan.
Sarah: Minivan. Exactly. There's the search for Patty and no one knows where she is or what's happening for a couple of months.
Mike: So she basically just disappears from her bedroom one night. Yeah, I guess this makes all the papers, but we don't know about this whole Symbionese Liberation Front thing until we find out, until months, months, months later.
Sarah: I think we knew about who had kidnapped her, but no one had any idea that she was going to emerge the way that she did, which is that they robbed a bank in April of that year. She's been gone a couple of months. And again, this is the media intruding in an interesting way, this is the first that anyone sees her again, is in footage of this bank robbery, where she shows up. And this is the iconic image of her, where everyone gets one iconic image, and this is hers. And it's her with the beret on and she's holding the assault rifle, and she's standing with it aimed at the tellers in this bank that the SLA is robbing and that gets broadcast. She disappears, she's the face on the missing signs. And then we see her again and she's Tanya. That's her Symbionese Liberation Army name.
Mike: Baller.
Sarah: And I think one of the problems with it really is that she looks great. You look at it and it's bank robbers chic. I mean, she looks like Faye Dunaway and Bonnie and Clyde in those images. Yeah.
Mike: She’s a 19-year-old girl, she's attractive. It's perfectly packaged to appeal to the People magazine reading public.
Sarah: Yeah. A week after the bank robbery, April 22nd, 1974, the SLA released recorded audio of her reading or reciting, or however you want to put it a statement. And she says “greetings to the people. This is Tanya.” And she described what the SLA did with the robbery is that they forced the corporate state to help finance the revolution.
Mike: I like her.
Sarah: Right? That's the thing. She ended up with a lot of great quotes in this, all of which she recanted later. But at the time she says, “Consciousness is terrifying to the ruling class. I am a soldier in the people's army.” Later on, she says, “I was coerced. After they kidnapped me, they held me in a closet for 54 days and I was raped, and I was abused, and told that I was this terrible daughter of the oppressors. And so I converted and held these beliefs out of a sense of terror and coercion. And that's why I was in the bank and that's why I appeared to cooperate.”
And I feel like there's just something so interesting there in that I would never doubt any of that or that she reached those views out of a sense of fear and needing to cooperate with her abductors and save her own life and be abused as little as possible. But these things are also very attractive and not radical if we're talking about how many people were holding these views in 1974.
Mike: Oh, just all that anti-corporate anti-system type of views?
Sarah: Yeah. Consciousness is terrifying to the ruling class, like consciousnesses, terrifying to the ruling class. Young people had reached sort of a consensus on that at this point in America.
Mike: Yeah. It's Watergate year, right? I mean, she’s not that far outside of the mainstream.
Sarah: It is Watergate year.
Mike: What did the liberation army actually want?
Sarah: I think they just wanted to wage war against America, and they had smaller manifestos within that, but that was what Patty Hearst described as their general goal. They also wanted to rob banks. And they were suspected of having killed at least one public official. And one of the demands that the SLA had that Patty's family complied with was that free food be given to the people of Berkeley. So they’re like, alright, we'll give free food to poor people if we can get our daughter back. Ronald Reagan, who's the governor of the state at the time says, and I quote, “I hope they all get botulism. Speaking not at the Symbionese liberation army, but of the poor.”
Mike: Yeah. Good old Reagan, just doing the empathy quotes, just bringing them out.
Sarah: That's the thing.
Mike: So the bank robbery happens. She releases this statement and then is this just a huge deal in the country? I mean, this must be front page news everywhere.
Sarah: Yeah. And she was on the cover of Time magazine, Newsweek magazine. Many times, her face is everywhere. I mean that Tanya image, that's one of the iconic images of this period, I think. It's as iconic as a portrait of Mao. Some people are saying right on Patty and some people are horrified. And then what happens that we forget about is that the authorities locate the Symbionese Liberation Army and kill six members in a shootout, which was one of the most violent shootouts that had happened in America at the time. Patty isn't there and she goes on the lamb, and no one knows where she is for 16 months. And then the police finally find her living in a house in California with three remaining SLA members and arrest her and bring her to trial. She's booked at the San Mateo jail, and she lists her occupation as ‘urban gorilla’. And so it's a funny story because the thing that people initially wanted to believe in the story that she was telling about herself for several years was that she had been living in the dark and then she was liberated by the Symbionese Liberation Arm and came to this political consciousness and became this urban gorilla. And that would be nicer in some ways to believe because it would give us more of an ability to believe in free will and autonomy. And one of the things that comes up in coverage of this trial is this idea that we are trying the idea of freewill and do people have it or not? And under what circumstances are we able to exercise it? And F. Lee Bailey, who her family hires as her lawyer, which is rarely a good idea it seems, uses brainwashing and Stockholm Syndrome as a defense. And that's the first time that we see Stockholm Syndrome come up with, ‘will jurors buy this or not’, basically.
Mike: So that’s how it gets popularized, as a kind of excuse for her robbing banks.
Sarah: Yeah, I think that's how we hear of it. And there are all of these things that come up in famous trials in America that are descriptions of malleable phenomena. Because if you're talking about a syndrome, then you're not talking about something you can put your finger on scientifically the way that you can do other things that mitigate guilt more effectively. Intoxication, something like that, where you actually have numbers that you can point to, but something like battered women's syndrome in the late seventies is a corollary to this where the idea is if women kill their extremely abusive partners, then maybe their guilt is mitigated by all of the abuse. And that's the phrase that we use to come up with it. And what tends to happen, it seems like, is that we have these famous trials that are lightning rods of controversy and where people are bringing a lot of their baggage about what they are and aren't ready to believe about human nature and society. And then they start getting seen as ways that people can use to spuriously excuse having done a crime that they just felt like doing. And that's how we start to see Stockholm syndrome.
Mike: It's weird because there's the Stockholm syndrome part. But then is she open about the fact that she's been being raped and kept captive? I mean, I was coerced into these beliefs is such a different explanation than I was Stockholm syndrome into these beliefs. Those seem like opposites to me.
Sarah: How would you separate those ideas?
Mike: One of them is I actually believe this stuff and one of them is I was pretending to believe this stuff because there was a gun to my head. But is that not what she's saying? Is she saying, I was abused to the point where I sort of was brainwashed?
Sarah: Yeah. That's one of the interesting things about it being such a flexible diagnosis is that I think you could say someone displayed Stockholm Syndrome if they were just pretending to go along, if someone had a gun to their head, but it could also be if under those set of circumstances, you do believe what your captor needs or wants you to believe. This is what I find really compelling about it. And when I try to imagine myself in that position, when I try to think about things like, if you are being held hostage, if you're in a closet for 54 days and the people who are in charge of whether you live or die have these beliefs, then are you actually going to start believing them? Because the human psyche would really like to survive. And that's one of the primary things that motivates us. And is that a real belief? It's a circumstantial belief, but is it not real?
Mike: And then that's when you get into this whole, the system is the problem, right? If we grew up in capitalism, how much do we really believe capitalism? Are we just being coerced into it? I can just feel myself having like a really boring manifesto of beliefs right now about whether we're coerced into anything we believe.
Sarah: But if you can use violent crime as a peg in some way, then that makes it a saleable article. But I do believe that about capitalism, actually.
Mike: It sort of installs certain beliefs, the circumstances in which you grow up, install a certain beliefs in you in the same way that being trapped in a closet would install a certain beliefs in you, too.
Sarah: Yeah. And also that I think capitalism creates a sense of learned helplessness in the consumer citizen because we literally can't imagine another way of existing because we haven't really done that, most of us, most of us who haven't gone to live in Sweden, where you can just call the prime minister. And I mean, another thing that is a hallmark of Stockholm syndrome, and that is very exportable to a really wide range of human behaviors is that if someone is being abusive to you or treating you badly some of the time, and then sometimes they're being nicer to you and doing things like what Jan Olson did, which is when in the bank robbery in Sweden, they ran out of food cause the police hadn't sent them rations in a while, he had three pears left over and he cut up his pears and gave some of the pairs to the hostages and ate some of the pairs himself. You'll cling on to that positive behavior that someone is showing to you, or find out what you can do that elicits them treating you nicely or behaving less threateningly toward you or seeming to like you, and then do that as much as possible. I mean how many times have you known someone or have you been this person where your friend is in a relationship and things are generally fine. And then they finally break up and they suddenly start talking about all of the awful stuff that was going on the whole time. And you know that they didn't talk about it or that you yourself, if you're that person didn't really talk about it, not just because of your saving face, but because you couldn't really accept that all of it was as bad as it was while it was happening.
Mike: And part of you knew how bad it was. And you knew that by talking about it, other people would too. But what's weird to me about this is that the bank robbery situation seems so different from Patty Hearst's situation. In the bank robbery it doesn't seem like there was any real coercion involved. It seems like the hostages in Sweden kind of came to like their captors because of that specific circumstance, but they weren't being bullied. They weren't being raped. They weren't being abused. It just seems weird, the stockroom syndrome is a weird defense for the Patty Hearst situation, because the situation is so different. It doesn't seem like the captors in Sweden were even trying to get them to be on their side. It seems like that was just like a weird side effect. Whereas in Patty Hearst’s situation, the central purpose of the SLA, to get her to say these things in the audio statement, was to get her to Rob a bank with them.
Sarah: That's a really good point.
Mike: So, it's weird that F. Lee Bailey used that as an excuse when they're two completely different scenarios.
Sarah: Well, and he apparently did a bad job generally, with that trial. Apparently during the closing arguments, he was holding onto one of his hands with the other, because he might've had alcoholic delirium tremens or something. And one of the jurors was like, well, the prosecutor had this really long methodical building to a crescendo closing argument and F Lee Bailey got up and seemed sort of tired and out of it and didn't say very much. And it's like, great. So you had a bad lawyer.
Mike: So she's arguing, I didn't actually commit these crimes because I was sort of coerced into them. So does that land? Was she acquitted?
Sarah: No. What happens is that she's given, and at the time that she went to trial, if they had wanted to really throw the book at her, she could have gone to prison for life, and ultimately is convicted and given a sentence, I think, of seven years and is pardoned after 22 months by good old Jimmy Carter who has become president by then. I mean, I like to think that Jimmy Carter, because he’s a secular Saint, just saw through all the bullshit. Yeah. The jury doesn't buy it and people still don't buy it. And I'll read you this fabulous YouTube comment that I found.
Mike: This is always very indicative of the larger discourse.
Sarah: Yes. Well, it's like you're reading about something and you're thinking about it and you're like, oh yeah, I got that. How could anyone really Look at someone who's been abducted as a teenager and held in a closet for 54 days and raped and terrorized, and eventually takes part in a bank robbery, but doesn't commit any violent crimes herself like that all makes sense. Surely there aren't people out there who just think that all of those explanations are bullshit, but there are, and they're all making YouTube comments. And so Patty Hearst did a Larry King live interview in 2002, looking great I might add. I really want one of the takeaways here to be that Patty Hearst has aged fantastically. And a YouTube commenter wrote, “She is so full of lies. She just enjoyed the ride and doing all of these things wrong and absolutely horrific and then using her position of privilege to be not be held fully accountable for her actions, justice, other members of the SLA, an organization, which she freely joined after she was taken. There was no quote Stockholm syndrome in her case.” I also love the phrase ‘an organization, which she freely joined after she was taken’. How do you freely join something after it kidnaps you?
Mike: They kidnap you, put you in a closet. They're like, well, we're not making you be a member of our club, but we're just going to give you the choice. We're going to leave the membership card under the door. It’s up to you.
Sarah: And while you're in here, between rapes, you can just think about what you really believe politically and offer us your considered opinion as a consenting adult.
Mike: Why was that hard for people to believe at the time? Looking back now, it's pretty obvious seeming that if someone is raping you and holding you in these terrible conditions, you do anything to get out of that, including robbing a bank and not harming anybody and recording a little snippet of audio. Why was that so hard for people to believe at the time?
Sarah: You know, that comment is a rich text for me, because it gestures toward what I think a lot of people, even if they don't know that they believe it believe when they think about their theories of crime and punishment, which is that we all secretly want to rob banks. We all want to be, you know, we all want to carry around a machine gun and wear a beret and do whatever we want, but we don't because we live in a society. And this idea that Patty Hearst was one of those bad apples who went off and did whatever she wanted and had fun and then wanted to be forgiven by claiming that she had some syndrome and it wasn't her fault. And we talk about rape and murder that way too. There's the idea that we all really want to be outliving lawless lives, committing violent crimes, but we don't. And we control ourselves. And the people who don't control themselves deserve to be punished because they’re doing what we all wish we could be doing, but we have the good behavior to not do it. And it's like, I don't want to commit violent crimes. Does everyone else want to commit violent crimes? Is that what we all secretly want?
Mike: She gave into her impulse as opposed to being coerced.
Sarah: And that's a weird assumption. And then there's also the idea of the things that we choose to believe about ourselves. And if you're going to say, well, if I were held in the closet for 54 days and raped repeatedly, I wouldn't call my parents pigs on an audio recording or go sort of stand around during a robbery. And it's like, really? I do a lot more than that.
Mike: What was the testimony from her captors? I mean, not that I'm inclined to believe them, but like, what did they say?
Sarah: I mean, unfortunately, a lot of them got murdered, so they can't tell us what happened. Because they got killed in a shootout. I don't know what physical evidence there was. I know that when she was taken in by the police. She weighed 87 pounds and she was small, but she wasn't that small for that to be a weight that it made sense for her to be at as a grown woman. She did a Playboy interview at some point in the seventies, which I read a long time ago. And one of the things I found really charming and human about it was that he talked about getting coerced and I think it was a combination, because she was in a position of needing to save her own life, whatever way she could. And having this young malleable abused psyche. One of the claims that F Lee Bailey made at trial was that she had lost 15 IQ points after what she had gone through and was operating at the level of a child, which he then also used as a way to claim that she didn't know what she was talking about when she tried to have her sentence overturned based on the fact that he'd been incompetent at time of trial. But under these codes, she's being coerced into accepting her role in a violent and abusive power structure. And as a member of the Symbionese Liberation minivan that is going around and plotting and planning and sometimes carrying out these other violent crimes. But they're also talking about things that are true and that the poor do need to be fed and they are living in a state where the governor thinks that terrorists have to force the government to take care of the hungry and the government bitches about it and says he hopes everyone gets botulism. I mean, I think there were a lot of groups at this time, too, in America, in the sixties and seventies that were complicated because they had genuinely humanist ideas that were knit up with violence and abusive uses of power and were often run by young, disenfranchised men who had been losers in every other thing that they had tried.
Mike: That doesn't sound familiar at all, men starting revolutions because they fail at everything else. I'm glad we’re done with that.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, and to quote Charles Manson, “mass killer, it's a job. What can I say?” And it's like, right, Charlie couldn't get a job.
Mike: So what is the afterlife of Stockholm syndrome? What happens with that term afterwards?
Sarah: Well, this made me think of the first time I encountered the term Stockholm syndrome, which was in the James Bond movie, The World is Not Enough, which you will recall featured Sophie Marceau as the villainous brunette and Denise Richards, as I think an astrophysicist or some sort of scientist.
Mike: All I remember from that terrible movie is that her name is Christmas. I think her name is Christmas Jones or something. And the only reason they named her character, that was so at the end, triumphant happy ending, they're kissing on a beach and James Bond goes, I thought Christmas came only once a year. It’s just the worst. And it's like, everything clicks into place. You're like, oh, that's why they gave her that fucking name.
Sarah: And then they could have called her like Arbor Day, too. There were other deeply bad James Bond movies before that, but that was one of the bad ones. And so Sophie Marceau's character, we think she's good, but then it turns out that she's allied with the villain, de jure of that movie. And the explanation that they give in script is that she has Stockholm Syndrome. I remember a scene where she's always wearing these chunky earrings and she takes one off. And part of her ear lobe has gone because of the tortures that she suffered on the way to getting Stockholm syndrome. And I remember as a kid being like, oh my God, Stockholm syndrome, how do you get that? And I think the consensus that we have as Americans to the extent that we think about Stockholm syndrome is it's something that you can come down with, like the flu.
Mike: It could happen to any of us at any time.
Sarah: Yeah. It’s this thing that comes over you from the outside and not a more extreme manifestation of behaviors that all humans exhibit in various capacities.
Mike: It’s a weird term though, that it came out of a very specific situation. This random Swedish dude made it seem like it was a generalizable phenomenon. Then we applied it to a completely different situation in which somebody was being deliberately coerced into having political views, which is not what the Stockholm original situation was, and then it's now this term that we use to talk about people who are being abused on a domestic violence level, in a situation in which they're not being physically confined, necessarily. And it's over a much longer term. So it seems like we're applying the Stockholm syndrome label to three completely different situations.
Sarah: I think so. I mean, an example of that too is sudden infant death syndrome that essentially just translates to a baby diet, and we don't really know why. And that's what that means. And it's something that you can put on an autopsy report. It's something that allows you to close a case and move forward. We're applying Stockholm syndrome as a defense strategy and Patty Heart’s case and the mitigating stuff that she had been through was so much more extreme than anything that had happened there. It's weird that F. Lee Bailey, or even a more competent lawyer, couldn't have just been like, and maybe someone else would have, talked about the abuse that she suffered and talked about how you would lose your sense of individuality.
Mike: It’s a story of coercion. I mean, the difference between the bank robbery and Patty Hearst seems the coercion was voluntary. The people, the hostages in Sweden, voluntarily came to sympathize with their hostage shakers, whereas Patty Hearst didn't.
Sarah: Do think that there's the power of the word syndrome in that, because I think even now we have a much more complex understanding of trauma and the way that it affects people and the way that systematic abuse, especially in a closed, little miniature society would lead you to do things that you would never normally do. And also, that you can see some of the SLA’s points also in the fact that when he's finally rescued from this abusive guerrilla army, that she had been kidnapped by, she's thrown in jail and then treated like some sort of paragon of wickedness of the hippie movement gone wrong.
Mike: You know who I blame for all of this? The New Yorker. I mean, I'm always finding the way to blame the media for everything now, as a member of it.
Sarah: Kind of our theme. Yeah.
Mike: People love to have little names for things and little rules for things, especially people who are, like us, overeducated tend to be left wing, interested in science, interested in understanding societal phenomena. We love to have these little rules, these little terms that we can throw out that allow us to explain things. I keep thinking of also in the New Yorker, the 10,000 hour rule, that this idea that there's no such thing as inborn talent. All of these concert pianists and these amazing basketball players, they're actually practicing 10,000 hours before they master whatever skill that they have. And this was something where the actual article in which it was written is relatively nuanced and is relatively conservative of hey, there's this real talent that isn't as big of a deal as we think it is. But then in the cultural consciousness, it becomes the 10,000 hour rule. The way to get good at something is to do it for 10,000 hours and that's totally reliable. And this is a scientific concept and it's like, it becomes this real thing once we have a term for it and once start to conceive of it as a rule, even though all of the scientists behind the evidence for the 10,000 hour rule say that it's much more complex than that. But what travels from that article of course is not the nuance and it's not the caveats, it's the little rule.
And so, it's the same thing here in that Stockholm syndrome is a really interesting concept and it has a name, it's a syndrome, a psychologist named it. It's a real phenomenon. We can use it to explain all kinds of things. And so it makes sense that people would read this article and kind of be like, Ooh, a new term that I can put in my quiver that I can use to explain all these complex social phenomena when really that term was not actually all that useful. And it was based on literally one thing happening. And then the term just ran away with itself and became applied to all of these other random situations. So maybe I don't blame the New Yorker necessarily. These are not mendacious people who wrote the article and it's the kind of article that I would have written and been really proud of myself for being like, oh, look, there's this new concept, but there is something about these long, big articles that point out a social phenomenon then being seen as rules or then being seen as proof of a concept, which is actually much more provisional than anybody ever wanted to admit, because it makes for a less interesting magazine story.
Sarah: Yeah. And we want keys for things. And I think the fact that we love the word rule, and we love the word syndrome says a lot. And then this comes up with battered women's syndrome too. There's a very quick backlash against that and the big case that gets this into this public consciousness is the Francine Hughes case in 1978 in Michigan, where a woman who had been consistently and horrifically abused by her husband for 15 years finally, just one day and the way that it slowly and then suddenly becomes, it became too much.
And so she got her four kids and put their coats on and put them in the car and then she poured accelerant all over him because he had passed out in their room and set the bed on fire, which became the Farrah Fawcett film, the Burning Bed. And then drove her kids and herself to the police station and turned herself in and went to trial. She was acquitted. She was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. And this is one of the cases that brings the concept of battered woman syndrome into the public consciousness. And then what happens is that there is all this weird rhetoric at the time where people repeatedly used the phrase ‘open season’ and are talking about being worried that it's going to be open season on men and on husbands.
Mike: It’s like the ‘me too’ thing, it's a witch hunt. You can't even hug your secretary anymore. It's the same kind of rhetoric.
Sarah: Yeah. And they're coming, they're coming for all the men.
Mike: Imagine being worried about that. You can't even beat your wife anymore without her trying to kill you. Imagine that being your concern.
Sarah: And also again, betraying this unspoken belief that doesn't make very much sense from where I'm standing. Obviously, all of our wives secretly want to kill us and now that they know they're not going to go to prison for a long time, if they do, maybe they will. Maybe you shouldn't treat your wife in a way that makes her want to murder you.
Mike: There’s also the question of whether the term syndrome is really doing anything there, right? Battered wife syndrome. I mean, another way to put that is that some women who are abused by their husbands lash out and kill them, some of them also don't. So to call it a syndrome implies that it's in some way universal when obviously it isn't because women are beaten all the time and they don't kill their husbands. So just putting a name to this phenomenon in which women kill their abusive husbands, it seems weird to call it a syndrome because syndrome implies that it's in some way universal or it's something that happens to everybody when obviously it doesn't. And also, you could apply this to Stockholm syndrome too. As you mentioned with the airplane hijacking, not everybody gets quote unquote Stockholm Syndrome.
Sarah: It’s pseudo-scientific.
Mike: That's a much better word than what I was saying. Yes, it's pseudo-scientific.
Sarah: Yeah. As men get afraid about women killing them all the time in the early eighties, then there's a backlash and women start getting handed, maybe even stiffer sentences then they would've gotten a few years prior because there is a sense-
Mike: Because they wanted to deter women from killing their abusive husbands. We can't stand for this.
Sarah: Yes. If we don't start handing out harsher sentences then… maybe we could do something to mitigate domestic violence in this country, but whatever.
Mike: That’s the social problem they wanted to solve, women killing their husbands, not the husband part.
Sarah: Yeah. And, and this idea that now that we have this defined battered women's syndrome, then a prosecutorial strategy that comes out of that is that you can say, well, she didn't really have battered woman syndrome. So she doesn't have the excuse of having been sick or having the syndrome that made her kill her husband, she's faking. And so it's something that you can apply to whatever you want. And for the same reason, you can also claim that it doesn't apply whenever you want.
Mike: It happens for some people and doesn't happen for other people, which makes it not all that useful as an explanatory factor. I keep thinking, you know that whole thing where if you put a frog in hot water, it jumps out, but then if you put it in cold water and slowly raise the temperature, it won't jump out until the water's boiling and the frog dies. So that's not actually true, frogs aren't stupid, frogs jump out of water when it gets too hot in the same way you would. If you were in a bath that kept getting hotter and hotter, there would be a certain point at which you would go, forget this. I'm going to get out of this bathtub. It turns out frogs do that, too. However, as a metaphor, that is very useful. It's useful when we talk about political phenomena, it's useful when we talk about personal phenomena, incremental changes don't get noticed to the same extent as extreme switches, right? So many people know that this frog metaphor is not true, but it's just a useful way of talking about incremental change. And I wonder if that's why Stockholm syndrome persists, it's useful to have this concept of sometimes people in situations that are bad for them actually sympathize with those situations and come to root for those situations. We now have a cute little catchphrase for that, that describes this actual social phenomena. Syndrome is the wrong word for it, I guess. It's more just Stockholm phenomenon or Stockholm sometimes. But sometimes people do this and sometimes they don't, but before, I guess, the early seventies, we didn't think that people would actually come to sympathize with their captors.
Sarah: Yeah. And as the opposite of what are the things that we don't need proof to believe in, what are the things that there's evidence of all around us, but that we need the magic feather of a syndrome to believe in. There was also a really interesting legal trend in the late 18th century in America, when commercial rat poison became available and suddenly women's husbands started dying, more than they had before. And poisoning wasn't detectable on an autopsy of the way that it would be today and so there would be these cases that Ann Jones writes about in a really shockingly nuanced based on its title, but called Women Who Kill where a woman’s husband would die and he would have eaten something that she had sort of urged him to eat a little bit weirdly, and then maybe a household pet ate some of and died or something like that. There would be very suggestive, circumstantial evidence and she would go to trial and the jury would be like, well, he was always in debt, and he beat her, and he was running around on her, but what motive could there be? How could a woman kill her husband? It doesn't make sense. And they would acquit them because they just couldn't wrap their heads around the idea of the motive.
Mike: If only there was some rubric through which we could understand this murder.
Sarah: If only there was, I don't know, a syndrome.
Mike: So, what did we learn? What do we learn about Stockholm Syndrome?
Sarah: I learned that the incident that we named Stockholm syndrome after was really less extreme than at this point, pretty much all of the situations that we've applied it to.
Mike: You learned that you should rob a bank in Sweden rather than the United States.
Sarah: Yeah. And then if I call the police and say, “Hey, we need some menstrual supplies in here” they'll be like, “Oh my God, we're not dealing with a garden variety criminal.” This is a complicated situation.
Mike: They're like, let's get the prime minister on the phone. Hang on, let’s patch in Olaf.
Sarah: Yeah. I've learned that there are countries where you can call the prime minister by the first name and tell them that you don't trust the police and you're siding with your captors. Thank you very much. And still, no one will die. I mean, the amazing thing about that bank robbery is that there weren't any fatalities. What did you learn?
Mike: I learned that I should stop writing magazine articles, because they create bad ideas in the public consciousness that travel much farther than the nuance and the complexity.
Sarah: You also shouldn't be too pretty. If you're a woman who's kidnapped and raped and forced to commit a crime, don't be pretty, because then people will really be suspicious of you.