Radiolab - How Stockholm Stuck

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

In August of 1973, Jan-Erik Olsson walked into the lobby of a bank in central Stockholm. He fired his submachine gun at the ceiling and yelled “The party starts now!” Then he started taking hostages. For the next six days, Swedish police and international media would tie themselves in knots trying to understand what seemed to them a sordid attachment between captor and captives. And this fixation, later pathologized as “Stockholm Syndrome,” would soon spread across the globe, becoming an easy, often flippant explanation for why people—especially women—in crisis behave in ways outsiders can’t understand. But what if we got the origin story wrong?Today on Radiolab, we reexamine that week in 1973 and the earworm heard ‘round the world. Is “Stockholm Syndrome” just pop psychology built on a pile of lies? Or does it hold some kernel of truth that could help all of us better understand inexplicable trauma?Special thanks to David Mandel, Ruth Reymundo Mandel, Frank Ochberg, Terrence Mickey, Cara Pellegrini, Kathy Yuen, Mimi Wilcox and Jani Pellikka."We have some exciting news! In the “Zoozve” episode, Radiolab named its first-ever quasi-moon, and now it's your turn! Radiolab teamed up with The International Astronomical Union to launch a global naming contest for one of Earth’s quasi-moons. Now is you chance to make your mark on the heavens. You can now vote on your favorites, here: https://radiolab.org/moon"EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Sarah Qariwith help from - Alice Edwards (also contributed research and translation)Produced by - Sarah Qariwith help from - Rebecca LaksOriginal music and sound design contributed by - Jeremy BloomAdditional Field Recording by - Albert Murillo (CC-BY)with mixing help from - Jeremy BloomFact-checking by - Natalie Middletonand Edited by  - Alex NeasonEPISODE CITATIONS:Please put any supporting materials you think our audience would find interesting or useful below in the appropriate broad categories.Videos/Documentaries: Bad Hostage by Mimi WilcoxStolen Youth: Inside The Cult at Sarah LawrencePodcasts:The Memory Motel Episode #13: The Ideal Hostage, hosted by Terrence MickeyWhy She Stayed, hosted by Grace StuartTalk to Me, The True Story of The World’s First Hostage Negotiation Team, hosted by Edward ConlonPartnered with a Survivor with David Mandel and Ruth Reymundo MandelSocial Media:Grace Stuart on TiktokBooks: Six Days in August: The Story of Stockholm Syndrome by David KingSee What You Made Me Do: Power, Control, and Domestic Abuse by Jess HillSlonim Woods 9, a memoir by Daniel Barban LevinOur newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail] support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Listener supported, WNYC Studios. Quick warning, this episode has a lot of discussion of trauma and violence, including sexual violence and abusive relationships. And it may not be suitable for all listeners. Oh, wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right.

Okay. All right. You are listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. See? See? Yeah.

Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab. And today it is producer and reporter Sara Caris' turn at the campfire to tell a story. David King All right. Sara Caris Yes. And we are going to kick it off with a story that I heard from a guy named David King. David King Okay.

Yes. My name is David King, and I'm a writer. Sara Caris And tell me, David, how did you get obsessed with this story? Like, where did you first hear about it? Well, I had the chance to live in Sweden in the 90s. And I used to walk past the square where the robbery took place every day on the way to the library, to the Royal Library for another project.

And I always heard of it. It was a big deal in Sweden. I had no idea how good the story was. I mean, it just had everything. So this story, it starts off with a robbery, one that maybe you've even heard of before, but it becomes so much more than that. Because it would end up giving birth to an idea

that lives in my head, in your head, in all of our heads, that has become kind of hard to shake loose. Oh yeah. Okay. But maybe I should just tell you the basic story first. Okay, yeah. Okay, let's do that. Let's do that. So, August of 1973. Thursday, August 23 Okay, yeah. Okay, let's do that. Let's do that. So August of 1973. Thursday, August 23rd, 1973. In Stockholm, Sweden. Downtown Stockholm. In this sort of big square in the downtown, it's called Normam Stori. It's got restaurants and shops and a big, fancy bank.

Svarja's Credit Bank. Svarja means Sweden. And on Thursday morning, the bank had just opened. A tall muscular man enters the bank. He has a lady's wig on. Grays, a bird's sweatshirt. He has some makeup on. This kind of bronzing powder. A pair of tinted sunglasses. And all of a sudden he rips out a sub machine gun, fires in the air, says the party starts down on the floor. But instead of just grabbing the money in the bank and running out the door, this guy, his name is Jana Erik Olsen, he starts taking hostages. They're all young. Ends up with three women and one man. They're all bank employees and he wants to use them as leverage for bargaining. And this is not something that really ever happened in Sweden at the time.

So the police... They ride by the scene fast. Oh, the police car is kind of pulled up. Right outside the building, the square. Starts stationing snipers on buildings near the bank. On rooftops. And right away, alerts are going out on the news wire. The press is there really fast.

All the major newspapers and TV and radio stations. So, Jana is in the lobby with the hostages, and he starts yelling his demands to the police. He wants three million Swedish kronor, which is a lot of money. Like today it would be like five million US dollars. But the really crazy thing is that then he demands that the police bring him... Clark Olofsson. The Sweden's most notorious gangster.

What? So Clark Olofsson... When he's 26 years old, he's very handsome, very charismatic. He was famous for robbing banks and bringing out of prison, but he was also very charming and sort of a media darling. He had become something of a folk hero to Sweden at the time. And I mean, in fact, I saw this one list of the 10 most

influential people in Sweden. Clark was one of them. Oh, wow. Yeah. So anyway, Janna. He wants Clark released from prison and brought to the bank. And incredibly the cops. They actually released Clark.

They actually do it. They actually bring him in. So some hours later, Clark is walking into the bank. And at this point point the media coverage just completely blows up. It just becomes a huge national news story. All the stations broadcasting live. 24-hour coverage, live updates are on the clock. At one point, you had about 70% of the entire country watching this. Oh wow. 70%.

JFK assassination, the moon landing. I mean, this was up there in Sweden. So pretty much the entire country is following all the news of Jana's demands, all the moves the police are making. But pretty quickly, everyone's attention turns to the hostages. The police start to see the hostages doing unexpected things. By this time, Jana and the hostages are sort of back in the bank vault, and the police have made their way into the lobby of the bank.

And at a certain point, Jana lets the hostages go to the bathroom. And the hostages go to the bathroom. One by one, unaccompanied, they go down some stairs and around the corner, out of sight of Jana and Clark. And then they... And go back to the vault. On the way back, walking right past a bunch of police officers. They could have run out, they could have left, But instead, they go back to the gunman. Huh.

Like, what? Why in the world? What's happening? What's going on here? And anytime they come out of the vault to talk to the police, their body language is kind of weird. That's right. Clark comes out with the hostages. He has his arm around them. And when the police chief thinks that they're frowning at him, there's a sense of hostility.

But the stories about these hostages really start to blow up when Clark manages to find a phone and brings it back into the vault. Clark is calling his friends in the media, giving interviews during the crises, which are being broadcast on radio. And at some point, the TV program Actuelt manages to get one of the hostages, this young woman named Elizabeth, on the line.

So they ask her, you know, how are you doing? How are you holding up? And she says, you know, So we're in good shape. We've been looked after. There's been real gentlemen toward us. And when the reporter is like, so the four of you are just sitting there hanging out? Elizabeth Corrects them and says, no, we're not four, we're six.

Then Radio Sweden gets an interview with another one of the hostages, Christine Enmark. Christine Enmark. Christine comes on the line. We interview her, we were not sure what she was going to say. This is Boro Jansson, he was an editor at Radio Sweden at the time. And he told me that Christine basically says... She's more afraid of the police than she is of the robber, or Clark Olofsson. The police are the real danger here.

That was extremely unexpected. Like they're badmouthing the police? Who trusts a robber armed more than she trusts the police. And to the people listening to the interview, it's just weird because she doesn't sound scared or distressed. Not depressed or anything like that at all. She just sounded angry actually. And so now everyone at home is glued to the news, trying to figure out what is going on with these women who seem to be siding with the gunmen. If you weren't brought into this story yet, you have another reason to be glued to your

television or your radio. And for six days, the hostage crisis carries on like this. There are reports that the hostages are helping Jana and Clark destroy security footage, that they are insisting to the police to let Jana and Clark go, and that they want to go with them. And at the end of this whole thing, when the police get them all out of the vault, you can see this on video, they're all saying goodbye to each other like they're old friends. Yes, so there were hugs and kisses.

At one point, the police are sort of forcing Clark down and Christine says, Don't hurt him, don't hurt him. And she turns to Clark and says, we'll see each other again. Wow. So in the days that followed, what you had was all these articles and news reports trying to make sense of everything. And you get all these experts saying that what happened here is that these women, Elizabeth and Christine in particular, had formed an attachment to their captors, to Jana and Clark, potentially even a romantic attachment. Basically, that they had developed

what we all now know as Stockholm Syndrome. I got it. Wow. So this is the origin of that. This is where Stockholm Syndrome comes from. Yes. I went in with the idea this is how it began. I thought that was going to be the story. But I had no idea how much we had wrong with it. According to David King, who ended up writing a whole book about this called Six Days in August, when he dug into the details of this case, the whole story sort of got flipped on its head.

I mean, from the beginning, in a way, because again... In particular, David says what you see is the police from the very beginning had no idea what they were doing. This was the first time that something like this had ever happened. This is Lars Erik. He was one of the first police officers on the scene and he's being translated here by reporter Alice Edwards. We had no experience negotiating these kinds of things. So pretty much right away what they do is they bring in somebody to be their negotiator. The psychiatrist, Nils Beyrut. The most famous psychiatrist

of the time. This is a reporter who was covering the situation at the time. My name is Åsa Måberg and I'm a writer and freelance journalist. And she told me that Nils Beyrud, he was supposed to be the best negotiator with those people in the Bangkok. So he was supposed to be talking to Jana and Clark and then advising the police on what to do. But it doesn't always seem like it was very good advice. For example, when Jana asked for all that money, at first the police seemed to be trying to meet his demands.

The police are scrambling to try to get this money. And Nils Beyrud actually walks in with the money. But it turns out to be sort of obvious that they're traceable bills. Which ends up making Jana, who already seems unstable, even more pissed off. And at the same time, they're escalating the situation by coming down the staircase, coming in other entrances, trying to sneak into the bank lobby. And we try to see what's happening. sneak into the bank lobby and we try to see what's happening. Trying to crawl into this scene so they can shoot him. Then Jana shoots at me.

Whoa. Seven bullets like a silhouette around my head. So Jana's really freaking out, ends up pulling the hostages back deeper into the bank. And when Jana demands that they bring Clark into the bank, well, they agree because... They're hoping Clark could be a help. I mean, the police were kind of desperate. But instead, they just handed Jana a charming, media savvy accomplice who knew what he was doing.

And from there, it's just like misstep after misstep. I mean, at one point when Jana and Clark and the hostages are in the vault, the police bring in beers, but then it's so obvious that the beers have been drugged that Jana catches it right away. He takes it and he just shakes it a little bit. There's a fizz. He realized that these bottles have been opened.

Oh, man. Which just made everything worse. Now, inside the bank, from the hostages' point of view, of course, at first they were terrified of Jana. I thought he was crazy. He was so nervous. Was very frightening for me. So this is actually one of the hostages, Christine Enmark, in an interview that she did with

podcast host Terrence Mickey. And she told him that while she was scared at first, once Clark showed up. The situation became totally different. He said, you can't have the girls tied up like this. He was calming everything down. And Janne became very calm. So I thought, wow, what's happening? So while the police are sneaking in and trying to shoot them

or sending in drugged beers, it's starting to feel like Janne and Clark are on their side. You know, the hostages want to call home. They want to call their family. Clark goes out, he finds the phone. Brings them back to the vault. Hostages can call home. Yana and Clark make it happen. Now, at this point, Yana and Clark have demanded a car, and the police got them a car and agreed to let them drive away. And Yana and Clark are nervous, so Elizabeth and Christine volunteer to go with them as collateral.

And the cops are saying, no, we can't do that. We can't let you go. But you know, for Elizabeth and Christine, they just want to get out of the bank. And this is where you get those phone calls where they're talking to the media, where you hear them saying, these guys are being being gentlemen and they're more scared of the police than they are of Jana and Clark. Then maybe the craziest thing of all happens. Around this time, Clark has called in a favor from one of his journalist friends and manages

to get connected to the prime minister of Sweden, Olaf Palme. And so Christine gets on the phone with him. Christine is almost like begging her. I said, I want to go with these guys. Let us go. We want to go. Olaf Palme, meanwhile. He's been woken up from a nap.

He listens to everything Kristina has to say and he's like, no. We can't do that, he says. You know, we have law and order. And Kristina is like, you can tell me about law and order some other time. And then according to Kristine, the prime minister says, Wouldn't it feel good for you to die on your post? What? Yeah.

Why would he say that? What a tone deaf thing to say. Yeah. The authorities denied that that was said. It's not in the transcript, right? But part of the transcript is missing. Interesting. I think it happened. And I think I know exactly where it happened. Because you could read

the transcript and all of a sudden you could hear Elizabeth saying something, there are enough dead heroes out there and it makes absolutely no sense. Yeah. Except this little spot, if you put it in, you know, if you insert that part where I think it is, then it makes sense. And Christine said it, Yana said it, you know, Clark, they all heard it.

Oh, wow. Okay. So. I was 23. I have this very low status at the bank, of course. It's like one of those moments where just like all the blood drains out of you. Right, the person who's supposed to be most in your corner is like, doesn't care whether

you live or die. When he said that, I thought, you don't understand nothing. Shortly after that, Niels Beirut and the police make a decision that would turn this whole situation into a total nightmare scenario. They sneak up to the door of the vault and... I remember hearing the... You know, when the door was shut. They lock Christine and Elizabeth and the other hostages

in there with Clark and Jana. So now they're trapped in a vault. Yeah. If you excuse me, that's when the shit really hit the fan. They call him a monster, they call him a madman, and now we're locking the hostages up with him. If you back somebody in the corner,

they can become dangerous. And honestly, he felt like a rat caught in a trap. What was their, they just hadn't thought it out. They just were like, let's contain them. Let's trap them in the vault. Did they have a plan trapping them in the vault? Well, it turns out it kind of was a little bit deliberate. Niels Beyrut realizes the more time these people spend together,

the more likely, we hope, that they will start seeing each other as human beings. They will be less as objects, less as leverage points. It's as if his strategy, his actual intentional strategy, was some version of like mutual Stockholm syndrome and he's literally trying to create that attachment. And in some ways, he does. The police had managed to bug the vault.

I had the access to the conversations that they had. They're talking about, you know, their hopes and their dreams and what's the meaning of life, a little philosophy, what books have you read? Talking like old friends. They start doing things to pass the time, like playing tic-tac-toe. They're even playing cards, playing poker, and they got a lot of money to play poker. They're in there now and the vault is locked so they don't have food. But Yana had saved some pears and he pulled it out and split it up, divided it into six and one

of the hostages or a couple of them noticed that he kept the smallest piece for himself. Meanwhile the police, the police started drilling. From above we start to drill holes down into the concrete. This is Jan Olsen. My full name is... Jan Erik Olsson. My full name is... Wait, so the bank robber? No, actually Jan was a police officer on the scene who happens to have the same name.

Yes. It's a little embarrassing. But he told me that... The drilling was very loud. The entire building started to rumble. Drilling was very loud. The entire building started to rumble. It must have been a horrible noise for the people inside the vault. I remember that there was some kind of scent,

like a smell of something grinding hard against stone. The light went out. The vault goes suddenly dark because the police have drilled through some electrical wiring. They're drilling and they're drilling. Jan is like, don't drill. He has hostages underneath the falling concrete. Even strings up nooses and puts them around the hostages' necks as a threat.

But they keep drilling. Day and night for I don't know how many hours, how many days. So I mean, it was a nightmare, nightmare situation. And then comes gas through the holes. Tear gas. And then something I'll never forget was the screams from below. These violent screams. You could hear on the tape the coughing, the choking. Devoured by the gas. Help, help! And it takes over 30 minutes. 30 minutes?

Yeah. After that, Jana finally surrenders. They all come out of the vault. And when I look out, I see these guys looking like Rambo. And the police are right there. No shirt on. Because they don't want to get tear gas stuck on their clothes. Weird. And you know, this is that moment where after going through all of that together, the hostages are hugging and saying goodbye to Clark and Jana. And so they drag them all out to the front of the bank where they have ambulances lined up with stretchers laid out and... The hostages were ordered to lie down on the stretcher.

And I refused. I wanted to walk out because I was so angry with the whole situation. At the end of it all, the hostages all get taken to the hospital. I read my journals from the hospital and it was very emotional. It shows how scared I was when I came there, how I couldn't sleep. I wanted someone to hold my hand. I was screaming. And a doctor walks into the room. And the first question that Christine received was, are you in love with Clark? Oh, weird.

And Christine is just flabbergasted by this. Like what? The psychiatrist couldn't believe that she was not, or another thing, they couldn't believe that John A. Clark had not made some sort of pass at them. And this story of this attachment, including the baseless rumors of romance, it continues along these lines, like long after the fact.

Like when the case eventually gets to trial, there's a rumor about the hostages refusing to testify against Yana and Clark. They testified. I read it. I read the entire transcript. There's a rumor that they got together and tried to raise money for the defense of either Yana or Clark. That also didn't happen. I've read PhD dissertations on this subject and they'll confuse. They confuse Elizabeth and Christine or Brigitte. I mean, a lot of basic details get bungled. I don't know.

It's just, it's amazing how something gets going and somebody quotes it and doesn't check and it gets quoted again and again and then you get this absurd monster in the end. Now I should say like during and right after the actual robbery, psychologists didn't really talk about what happened to these women as some kind of generalized disorder. In fact, no one really even used the phrase Stockholm Syndrome. But when we come back, we're going to take a break, when we come back, we're gonna take a break. When we come back, we're gonna trace the path of this idea

that we all know from this rumor-laden Swedish bank all the way into your head. Okay. Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab. We are back with Sara Kharey. Hello. Talking about Stockholm Syndrome. Or the thing that, as I said right before break, in the months after the hostage crisis

wasn't yet even called Stockholm syndrome. Neil's Beirut is credited with that. Coining the term, you mean? Yes, but I read all his reports to the police, listened to the interviews, and he doesn't use the phrase. According to David King, the idea of this like being a syndrome actually comes from the NYPD. What?

Yeah. Why? So, in the early 1970s, hostage negotiations were a relatively new thing. No police department anywhere had any kind of systematic approach for what to do. It was, you know, let's see if we can talk or the hell with it, we're going in. This is Ed Conlin. My name is Edward Conlin and I was a detective with the NYPD and I'm also a writer. And he's written a lot about the moment when hostage negotiation as a practice emerged.

And one of the things that interests me about it is that it was created in response to the 1972 Munich Olympics when Israeli athletes were taken hostage and killed. And we had a chief here who said, do we have a plan? What do we do if that something like that happened in New York City? The answer was no. And he said, let's come up with something. And the guy who was tasked with coming up with something was a police officer named Harvey Schlossberg.

Harvey Schlossberg, a former detective with a degree in psychology. If there was a museum of New York Jewish accents, that's all it is. Harvey's would be in it. It's Brooklyn 1950. You can say a lot of things wrong. It doesn't really matter. He's small, kind of a trim guy. He's got the 70s sideburns.

He smokes a pipe. He's kind of classic New York intellectual type. And so all through the summer of 1973, Harvey's trying to figure out what they should do, what they need to think about, and how do they put together a plan? And in August of 1973, you have the bank robbery in Sweden. Harvey hears about it. He reads up on the case.

And shortly after... The Stockholm Syndrome, I'm not going to go through the whole Stockholm Syndrome at this point. There's footage of him using the phrase Stockholm Syndrome with a group of New York City police officers. At this point, let me suffice to say the Stockholm syndrome simply means the forming of a relationship. Of course, the more stress in the situation, the quicker the relationship and the more intense it's going to be. As far as David King can tell, Harvey is the first person to coin the term. Yes.

Oh, wow. So this is the guy, Mr. Stockholm syndrome himself. Yeah. I contacted him to get it confirmed. I said, Mr. Stockholm Syndrome himself. Yeah. I contacted him to get it confirmed. I said, yep. And specifically what he would tell police officers in these trainings is... You should not trust the hostage. The hostage will side with the criminal.

Don't automatically assume they know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. You cannot share intelligence with the hostage. The hostage will tell the criminal everything you tell him. Wow. That's like, it's not a one-off thing. It's like I just presume that's true. Yeah, right. And, you know, after training, you know, the New York City police officers, Harvey and

his team, they train the FBI and then they start traveling all over the place training other police departments. Every police agency in the Western Hemisphere and some of the Eastern, I mean, they train the world. I mean, they trained 7,000 officers across 1,500 different police departments. Wow. It's so interesting that so much of this is a it's like a cop diagnosis right it's like it's like law enforcement and I don't know the psychologists working with them as the ones defining what this is yeah totally but then in 1974 it leapt out of the police training handbook and into the public consciousness has been a

big kidnapping on the West Coast. The victim is Patricia Hearst. Thanks to the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. Oh. The granddaughter of the legendary William Randolph Hearst. So February of 1974, just six months after Stockholm, Patty Hearst, 19-year-old heiress to the Hearst family fortune, is kidnapped by this group

called the Symbionese Liberation Army. Dragged, screaming, half naked from her Berkeley apartment. She's kept in a closet, beaten and raped. Then 71 days after the kidnapping a bank robbery by the SLA. Two months later the SLA is robbing a bank in San Francisco and on the security footage from the bank you can see Patricia Hearst in the middle of it all. The girl in the wig with the automatic rifle was Patricia Hearst. She appeared to be helping them rob the bank. Then she actually gave an interview saying that she joined them.

I have been given the choice of one, being released in a safe area, or two, joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army and fighting for my freedom and the freedom of all oppressed people. I have chosen to stay and fight. And sort of like with the Stockholm situation, when people heard this interview, they just thought she didn't sound the way that someone who's been kidnapped and beaten should sound. Yeah. There's no hint of...

Coercion or anything. Yeah. There's no hint of... Coercion or anything. Yeah. And so some people started to think maybe she's brainwashed. Other people to this day think that she was ideologically aligned with the SLA. And as the entire nation was trying to make sense of all this... In June of 1974... Well, I have to give Truman equal time. Well, I can't do this. Truman Capote goes on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

Somerset Maugham once referred to him as the hope of modern literature. Super famous writer, like wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood. Fiction, non-fiction writer, probably one of our times. Would you welcome Mr. Truman Capote? He sits down with Johnny Carson and he explains, well, you know what I think is happening with Patty Hearst is... What that thing called the Stockholm syndrome. You know what the Stockholm syndrome is?

No, I don't. So a couple of years back... So he tells the whole original Stockholm story. And they were having continuous sort of affair, I mean, forced in the beginning. False rumors and all. These girls refuse to testify against them. And one of them is now engaged to this convict and is going to marry him on his release. That statement hits the news wires and this totally bogus version of the Stockholm story just goes viral.

One of the women is waiting for the robber to get out of jail to marry him. What? One of the females went on to marry one of the captors. Suddenly everybody, Stockholm syndrome and the mind control, is talking about Stockholm syndrome. The individual is reduced to total helplessness. And running with this idea that people, especially women, in these sort of hostage or kidnapping situations, become attached even romantically to their captors. There may be a similarity in the Iranian hostage situation and what you refer to as the Stockholm syndrome. And then through the 80s and into the 90s...

It's a very primitive, almost childlike, attachment that develops. People try using it to explain why some kidnapped kids seemingly never try to escape. For 18 years, J.C. Dugard was held by a convicted sex offender. She developed a bond with her abductor. Elizabeth Smart, kidnapped from her Utah bedroom in 2002, never tried to run either. And pretty soon, it's getting used to explain cult members, sex workers, victims of sex trafficking, victims of child abuse. Right. It's the when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail kind of thing.

Yeah, totally. I mean, it's being used to explain things that are not at all like hostage situations. Most prominently... Is it reasonable to take what we've learned about Stockholm syndrome related to kind of domestic abuse. Domestic abuse? How do you deal psychologically with a woman who feels like the Stockholm syndrome tied inextricably to the batterer? So I think that the media really hooked onto this concept because it was mysterious.

You know, how do these victims get changed in this situation? Well, here's a really simple explanation. This is journalist Jess Hill. I'm the author of See What You Made Me Do. And Jess says when Stockholm syndrome is applied to women who are caught in an abusive relationship, it can act as almost a cover for a much more deeply pernicious idea.

That actually women, they stayed with their abusers because they liked it. It becomes clear how it draws on a long history of psychological theories that try to explain or maybe even explain away those relationships, going all the way back to the early 1900s. From Sigmund Freud, who claimed to have discovered that there are these essential forces that drive human behaviour, and according to Freud, all women who were essentially lesser for lacking a penis and envied men for having penises were innately masochistic and unconsciously sought to be punished.

So in the 1940s and 50s when you had Freudian theories really at their peak, social workers who were working with what we termed battered women, they believed that women would actually look for men who would abuse them. Then Jess says when you get to the 1970s, you start to have a supposedly more modern scientific understanding, drawing on physiological science about fight or flight and learned helplessness to say that actually women stay in abusive relationships because they are rendered unable to act. Now, of course, it's an improvement on masochism, where you'd actually feel some pity for the victim instead of just thinking that's there's some masochistic harpy, but it still lays the blame on the victim for her abuse.

It's your passivity that drove the perpetrator to actually abuse you in the first place. And so Stockholm syndrome comes around and I think part of why it's so resonant is it ties all of those ideas into a super neat little package, right? Like you have elements of like she's into it and also she's helpless and those ideas are kind of just packaged together. Yeah, it's a cocktail. It's a cocktail. Of those other ideas.

Yeah, that have been floating around in the culture. And these days it's still thrown around by the media in this kind of willy-nilly way. It comes up in pop culture. Is it in the DSM? No, actually it's not. And it never has been. And even though it's not in the DSM, in the academic world, it still comes up. You'll see like a paper here or there that mentions it,

or a psychologist going on TV that talks about it. And it's still sort of around. Yeah, in curriculum, it comes up. If you begin to work with law enforcement, it can come up periodically in that arena. It's just kind of part of the air that you breathe in a certain kind of way. So this is Alan Wade. He's been a therapist for over 35 years.

Specializing in cases of interpersonal violence. And Alan told me that about eight years ago he was working for a while in Sweden. Out of the blue, one of my close colleagues said, would you like to meet the Stockholm Syndrome lady? Meaning Christine Enmark. The woman who said to have Stockholm Syndrome. And I thought about it for a minute. I said, well, talking to the first person ever said to have Stockholm Syndrome is a

bit of a rare opportunity. So I said, okay, sure. We arranged to meet in a Wayne's coffee shop in the central part of Stockholm. So I'm sitting having a cup of coffee and Christine, who I didn't know was Christine, but suspected it might be, tapped me on the arm. And what does she look like? Oh, she has blonde hair. She's very well attired.

I'm not fancy, but pleasant. So they sat down and started talking, and Alan says that right away, Christine... She said, are you interested in Stockholm syndrome? And I said, well, honestly, I'm a little bit unsure about the idea. And she looked at me with a big smile and said, me too. So Alan and Christine ended up talking for the next several hours. One of the things I realized quickly

is that none of the world experts on Stockholm syndrome had ever talked with Christine. People had been traveling the globe, talking about Stockholm syndrome as experts. But none of them apparently had ever asked her about her experience in the bank. About the events as they unfolded. So Alan just started talking to her about her experience in the bank. About the events as they unfolded. So Alan just started talking to her about it.

Could I ask you this? Could I ask you that? And he says that there were these moments in the conversation where it seemed like Christine was still trying to make sense of her own behavior. She said to me, why did I volunteer to be the hostage that went with Yana Olson to leave the bank? Why did I volunteer? So I asked for more detail about context and I learned that there were three other hostages.

Christine talked about these other hostages, Sven and Elizabeth and Brigitte. And when she said Brigitte's name, she began to tear up a little bit. And she told me over hearing a phone call that Brigitte had from the bank vault with her husband. And then said something like, yes dear, I'm a hostage in the bank and I won't be home for dinner. You're going to have to pick up the girls from school and they'll be hungry. I left some fish at the back of the fridge, etc. So at that moment I looked at Christine and I said, were you protecting those little girls

by protecting their mother? She looked at me with a very firm expression and said, you know, I had a purpose. So at that moment, at that moment, the framework of so-called Stockholm syndrome really fell apart like a house of cards. So, for Alan, clearly Christine wasn't helpless or weirdly under the sway of these bad men. She didn't have a syndrome. She was acting in a way that was rational, that made sense given the situation that she was in. So it's like even patient zero didn't have the thing.

Yeah. But now where does that leave you? Like what do you make of this? Like is that just all total BS and is case closed? I mean obviously it's as you said, Christine didn't have Stockholm syndrome. It doesn't apply to her. And you can trace as we have this whole journey of how this thing that was started out as a lie becomes warped into this thing that we all know.

And so I guess for a lot of the reporting, I've kind of been operating on that assumption. This is a lie. There's nothing here. But as I went through the reporting, I came across accounts of people that felt something for their captors, felt attached to their captors. I literally argued with psychologists who were saying, this is real. And my patients come into my office experiencing feelings for people that have hurt them. And I was like, no, you're wrong. This is a lie. And I haven't known what to do with it.

I don't know. I feel like I've even seen this in my own life. Like there are people you see, and not just women, men too, who are in situations of domestic violence, or there are people who are in these very complicated, toxic relationships and they can't get out. Like there is a thing to be explained. I mean, yeah, true. And even when I go online and go poking around in places like Reddit or TikTok.

You need to talk about Stockholm syndrome because... Right away... ...very real trauma response that can happen called Stockholm syndrome. You can see that like for a lot of people... ...Stockholm syndrome and relationships... You start to sympathize with your abuse... This thing that... ...I'm still kind of working for it...

...started out as a lie feels like their truth, that they feel seen in some way by Stockholm Syndrome. They're self-diagnosing with it. And under every one of these TikToks, there's comments and comments of people being like, yes, that is me. Not in an ironic, silly way, like in a real, like this is, I have this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And honestly, I just felt stuck. But after the break, I will tell you about how I got unstuck. Just a reminder, this episode contains detailed discussions of trauma and violence, including sexual violence and abusive relationships.

I'm Luthif, this is Radiolab, we are back with reporter-producer Sara Khare. And before the break, you were telling me how stuck you felt and how you weren't even now sure what to think of Stockholm Syndrome. Right. So I did really want to talk to people that have actually been through something like this and are trying to reckon with their own experience. Like how do they make sense of it themselves? If there were to be a mess up, can I just pause for a second, like recollect myself? Oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I ended up talking to a couple of different people with very different experiences, but

I want to start us off with this woman, Grace Stewart. So I'm originally from the greater Philadelphia area, and I now do a lot of domestic violence advocacy through social media. I actually found her on TikTok, but she also has a podcast. Called Why She Stayed. And she does one-on-one coaching for people who are in abusive relationships. And I came into this space just through my own lived experience. Grace herself was in an abusive relationship for several years.

There was a lot of emotional abuse, sexual abuse. There's so much. And one of the things that I noticed in Grace's TikToks about the relationship, which is honestly what made me want to talk to her, is how despite all that, when she was in the relationship, she would have a lot of conflicting feelings about walking away. Yeah, absolutely. I think I'm curious if... And so I asked her, you know, had she ever come across Stockholm syndrome and what did she think of it as a label or an explanation

for her experience? So yeah, it's an interesting question. And she told me that she did actually contemplate the term at one point in her relationship. At the time, so many people just definitely wanted me to get out of it and were putting a lot of pressure on me to not marry him. Like, please just don't do it. But I was still very bonded to him. And I remember sitting in my recliner in my living room, just very disheveled. I hadn't eaten that day.

I was just so sick with like, anxiousness. So sitting there on her couch, Grace says she opened up her computer. And that's when I searched Stockholm Syndrome. She says that when she read up on it, she felt relief. I was like, okay, this feels like what I'm going through. Maybe I'm going through. Maybe I'm not insane." And I think having that name for your experience is extremely important in getting free. Because, she says, it helped her start to see where her resistance to leaving and that

feeling of being bonded to her ex was coming from. The best way I can describe it is many victims have amazing instincts and they are really intuitive. But people don't realize how much of domestic abuse is about confusion. For Grace, it was... I think I got it all wrong. ...confusion about what was even happening. What if I overreacted and made something out of nothing? Whether to judge her ex by his good days or his bad days.

Is he the good guy or is he the bad guy? Is he kind or is he cruel? Or if maybe... Am I a perpetrator? Am I a narcissist? There was something wrong with her. Let me just change this one thing about myself. Grace says at the time she wasn't even sure what to call this thing that was happening to her. I felt like I had nothing to point to, nothing concrete to say this is what's happening to

me. It's the thick confusion that kept me trapped. And so when she ran into the idea of Stockholm, it was like, look, this is what's happening here. And that was super, allowed me to take a deep breath. So if someone resonates with the term Stockholm at some point in their journey, and it brings them clarity, then okay. It's not the term I would select as the best one.

I related more to trauma bonding, which is the term that I find more appropriate for survivors. But it's a starting point. Thinking back to when I was stuck about whether Stockholm Syndrome was true or false or what, I think what I heard from Grace is that there is a grain of truth here that matches her experience, which is that you can feel care or loyalty or empathy or affection for someone who's treating you badly, but she also told me that the real turning point for her was when she figured out how to stop troubleshooting her own actions and and instead put the microscope on what the abuser is doing and kind of unravel their tactics.

What's he doing to make you scared? What's he doing? Yeah. And that's when she started noticing. I'll inflict the pain, then they'll rescue. All of her ex's tactics, like, wasn't always telling me I couldn't go see friends or I couldn't see my family. He would just make those things very difficult for me.

Subtly isolating her or He used to flip cause and effect so much. He would say I got him like this. Shifting blame onto her or even Oh no, that didn't happen like that. You're crazy. Plain old gaslighting. It was about power and control. And Grace says that when she was able to identify what her ex was doing and how she was responding

to it. For me, that was what opened my eyes. It really sealed the deal for me. It really did. So it's really important to know that coercive control. What's interesting is that when I was talking to Jess Hill, she told me that this shift to looking at the perpetrator, looking at the abuser, it's not just helpful for victim survivors like Grace, it's also helpful for people looking

at these kinds of situations from the outside. When you start to see what the perpetrator does, the behaviour of the victim survivor starts to make much more sense. And not just that, it means that you can do away with terms like Stockholm Syndrome and try to talk about and look at what's going on without the victim blaming or scrutiny. And like for me to get to this point in the reporting, it was really exciting because it's like, okay, here's a way to talk about things that are happening, things that are hard to talk about in a way that doesn't do more harm,

you know? But I swear to God, in the middle of all this, I sat down one evening and I was watching this sort of true crime documentary about the cult at Sarah Lawrence College. And I'm watching the people that are joining this cult and it was all just so strange and foreign to me that I found myself having this knee-jerk reaction of asking these questions like, oh, why did they do that? Why didn't they just leave?

Why did they do X or Y or Z? Strange thing. And so of course, as I'm doing this, I'm like, oh my God, I am still doing the same things. All of those same impulses to scrutinize the victim. It just immediately just slotted right back into my brain and Like literally in the midst of all this reporting so that felt very uncomfortable Yeah, and so I'm sitting there and I'm thinking all this stuff and I'm like Honestly, maybe what I need to do is call one of these people

I'm gonna take a sip of this water. Yeah, do it and get used to hearing every detail in such high fidelity And so I did okay. My name is Daniel with this water. Yeah, do it. And get used to hearing every detail in such high fidelity. And so I did. Okay. My name is Daniel Barban-Levin. I live in Los Angeles and I'm 33. I kind of want to get a little bit into your backstory. And I think that this is the conversation that finally got me where I wanted to be. Not just like intellectually, but also emotionally.

I recognize that I guess what I'm about to ask is a really big question, but you already know what I'm gonna ask. Like what happened? Yeah. Okay, I went to Sarah Lawrence College. One of my roommate's dads, Larry Ray, got out of prison and needed a

place to crash and we said yes. And he started a sort of self-improvement routine with me and my roommates, which seemed fairly innocuous at first. And the next summer he got an apartment in Manhattan and offered me a couch to crash on while I was working in the city and I took him up on it. And all of that devolved over time into abuse, sexual abuse, psychological, physical abuse, coercion, and ultimately what you would call a cult. And that averaged around maybe eight people in this apartment in Manhattan.

I was there for about two years altogether, and then I left and I spent the next five or so years processing, not believing what had happened, being totally shell-shocked. So about six years after Daniel left the cult, news about it broke. This is in 2019. It became a big story about the Sarah Lawrence cult. And Daniel has since been interviewed about it. and I mentioned there was a whole documentary about it But for those six years, he said he didn't talk to anybody about it at all Yeah, I think just I couldn't really face what had actually happened right and I mean like how do you? It's just such a crazy thing to say out loud. It's like you feel like you're constantly trying to prove it both to yourself and to

someone, even a sympathetic listener. It's like you're telling them you saw an alien. It's really, it takes a lot of self-confidence that I don't really like come with out of the box. No, I get that. I wish there was one word I could say and it would be fully understood. But counter-intuitively, actually leaving the situation required letting go of a need for an explanation.

I had to accept that I wasn't going to know why this had happened, how I could justify it to myself or others. I just needed to listen to my body and leave or else I felt like I was gonna die. But you know, I wish that I could just, I wish that I didn't feel like any of it was my fault. You know, everybody who hears a story of a man I could just, I wish that I didn't feel like any of it was my fault, you know?

Everybody who hears a story of a man beating and sexually abusing a bunch of 18 to 20 year olds in an apartment in New York think to themselves, I would have walked out the door. I mean, I felt myself doing this when I watched the documentary, like knowing everything I know and working on this, I was still just like searching for something like, what was it about these people, you know? And catching myself asking that question. I mean, it's fair. That has been hard for me to navigate too. There were people who were living in that same house where he was sleeping on the couch

and didn't get pulled into the cult. But you know, speaking for myself, I was 18 going to college for the first time, had not reckoned with my neglectful upbringing and my mom's chronic illness and my own struggles with sexuality and just trying to figure everything out and having no guidance. And that's a great time for somebody who presents as a kind of father figure to show up and offer some relief. On the other hand, Daniel says, I mean, he knows that his vulnerabilities don't fully

explain what happened either. Like we all have vulnerabilities. We all have vulnerabilities. A lot of people have vulnerabilities and trauma and explain what happened either. Like we all have vulnerabilities. We all have vulnerabilities. A lot of people have vulnerabilities and trauma and all of these things. And it just seems like you could either scrutinize the victim survivor more and more, or you could look at the pernicious tactics

of the perpetrator. But Daniel feels like both of those things can leave people with the same picture of the person who is going through the experience. What people imagine is that you sort of become like a mannequin and someone's pulling the strings as if you're being magically controlled. And I think that it's so much simpler than that. I did things that I might not otherwise do

because I was in a situation where that seemed like the most sensible option, according to the information I had, you know? And I was scared. Like when I lived with Larry, I remember looking down at my feet and seeing like visible dirt spots because it had been so long since I'd been allowed to shower. And now, of course, that sounds so

out of control, but you just kind of proceed trying to avoid pain, you know, and then you add on top of that all of my friends were there and I watched them do the same things. We didn't have opportunities for like cross talk or reality checking. It's like, you know, him slicing a grape vertically versus horizontally and having me taste it and say that it tasted different sliced horizontally or vertically. And I agreed, you know, even now I'm like, I guess the oxidization, there's like more surface area, you know, so it's yeah. And on top of all that, Daniel was telling me about how at the time he was basically broke in New York City and he'd find himself thinking that maybe things would actually be even worse if he left. You know, so it's just like the known evil versus the unknown evil and some costs and it's all the same factors.

The brain hasn't magically changed. You know, you're just in a different situation, which I, and I know I'm not ignoring that the situation is crazy and really, really bad, but you still just, you only have the same tools and are bringing them to bear. And you know, the way you make decisions is just with the information you have. That's a way of answering that question.

Why didn't you leave? And it would be much easier if the answer was just, we developed Stockholm Syndrome. Right. I mean, speaking of Stockholm Syndrome, I guess I am curious what you think of it or how you feel about it. I think that Stockholm Syndrome, it's one in a long line of really easy answers that we offer to ourselves in order to not have to confront complicated and scary questions. Questions like, you know, is it possible that something like this could happen to me? Like, because if you have those vulnerabilities and this kind of person walks into your life, then it's like really hard to say what you would do.

I think that's the scariest piece of it. And I think that's what an idea like Stockholm protects us from. It satisfies our need to be like, well, I would never respond like that. And the fact is, you don't know how you would respond until you're put in that situation. And I can tell you, victim survivors, they never thought they'd respond like that either. And now they're on the other side of that experience, and they realize things that they never thought they would do, they did under those conditions, because it's a fundamentally human response. I actually think that trauma is,

unfortunately, one of the more normal experiences you can have. Yes, the facts of what occurred are extreme, but the effects are still the same. You know, fear and grief and confusion and isolation. But when people hear Stockholm Syndrome, it's just like, it's such a throwaway term, and I think we should be suspicious of any concept which doesn't invite further curiosity. I mean, people, if it is a thought-terminating answer, and we just say, oh, well, it was Stockholm Syndrome, anything that ends our curiosity, I think, is really bad. I feel that. I feel that hard, especially as a journalist. But also if you're, you know, a psychologist, or also if you're a friend,

or also if you're, you know, just someone who watches a lot of cult documentaries. Like, I do think that you gotta, you have to want to ask more questions. Yeah, right. And I think that if the questions that we were asked was less like, explain to me why you didn't leave and was more like, how did you leave? I'm so glad that you got out. Can you help us understand how you did it? And honestly, at the end of all of this, just to go back to the beginning for a sec, I can't help but think about Christine Enmark, you know, the patient zero of Stockholm Syndrome, and all

of the questions that for 40 years nobody asked her. I always felt that I did something wrong. I said wrong things. I said that I was afraid of the police, I wanted to get out, I wanted to go with them. And after this drama, all the attention has been focused on this. Instead of looking at what did Janne do, what did Clark do, what did the police do, what did the society do, you said they're not really healthy. They got into something wrong. You know, a syndrome. So I had this 40 years of the feeling of doing something wrong.

All the things that I did was instinct of survival. I wanted to survive. I don't think it's so odd. Thank you for that whole journey, Sara. Thank you. And thank you all for listening. If you or someone you care about is experiencing domestic violence, remember you are not alone. Help is available. In the United States, you can reach out to the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE, 1-800-799-7233, or visit their website at thehotline.org.

They offer confidential support 24 7 365. Your safety and well-being matter and there are people who care and want to help. Sara, do you want to do the special thanks? Yeah, yeah. Okay, I should say this episode would not have been possible without Alice Edwards in particular. She contributed research, reporting, translation. Also, big, big thanks to Terrence Mickey for letting us use the tape of his conversation with Christine Enmark, to Mimi Wilcox for help with archival audio.

Check out her documentary, Bad Hostage, very similar vibes to this episode. And thanks also to Frank Ochberg, David Mendel, Ruth Raimundo-Mendel, Kara Pellegrini, Kathy Ewen, and Yanni Pelica. Oh, one more thing before we go. Sara? Yes?

Do you remember when you produced that story about Zuzvei? Yeah, of course. The moon-ish object around Venus that we officially named Zeusvay. And then we learned that Earth has Quasi-moons too. Right. And then we started a global competition to come up with a name for one of these Quasi-moons. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Well, I am here to tell you and anyone who is listening that we gathered a bunch of expert people,

astronauts, astronomers, celebrities, high school students. We had this crack panel who help winnow down, because we got something like 2,700 name submissions Wow. From like, I think 90 something, almost 100 countries. What? Dang. And so they winnowed that all down to seven finalists. Ooh.

So now you and everyone and anyone living on planet Earth can vote for the name of the Quasi-Moon and the winner will be the official name that will outlive us all. That is so crazy, Lethiv. I still am not over how this started with you seeing a thing and your kids. It's just crazy. Anyway, so cool.

Well, but the fun that I and that we had in Naming Zuzve, it's now we've democratized it and it's out there and anyone anywhere can can vote for their favorite and the names are beautiful interesting and Wait, and where do you go to vote? There's somewhere you can see all the names and yeah Is that yep the place where you see the names and vote same place go to radiolab.org slash moon radiolab.org slash moon Voting is open now all the way until January 1st, 2025. So yeah, this December, tell everybody you know, and vote yourself, and that is really your best chance

to make your mark on the heavens. Oh, amazing. I'm gonna go vote right now. Okay, and while you do that, I will say that this episode was reported and produced by Sara Khari with production help from Rebecca Lacks, edited by Alex Niesen. That's it for us. We'll catch you next week. Bye. Hey, I'm Lemon and I'm from Richmond, Indiana, and here are the staff credits.

Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Lots of Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our Director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Pressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nayan Sambandan, Matt Kielty, Rebecca Lacks, Annie McEwan, Alex Niesen, Sara Khari, Sarah Sandback, Anisa Vitsa, Ariane Wang, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. I'm Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.

Hi, my name is Treza. I'm calling from Colchester in Essex, UK. Leadership support for Radiolab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betsy Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, the Seymonds Foundation Initiative and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.