You're Wrong About - Stockholm Syndrome

Episode Date: May 20, 2018

It’s not a real thing! … OR IS IT? Sarah tells Mike about the convoluted history of a contested term. Digressions include James Bond, Charlie Manson and rat poison. Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

No one has ever done that in real life, but it's like every sitcom has featured a subplot where somebody makes an actual written-down pro and con list. Yeah, and Ross did that about Rachel on Friends. And in retrospect, that relationship never should have happened. Ha ha ha. So welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we set right what we once got wrong. Still struggling. I am Michael Hobbs.

I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. And I'm Sarah Marshall, and I'm a writer for the New Republic and BuzzFeed. And today we're talking about Stockholm Syndrome. Yeah. So, Michael, what can you tell me about Stockholm Syndrome? 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 kind of take on their political beliefs as your own.

And so in the 70s, 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. When you think of the famous American cases, who do you think of? Oh, Patty Hurst. 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 Hurst, is that when you get kidnapped, you take on the political views of your captors and she was kidnapped by the Symbionnes Liberation Army, which while researching this, I got to finally find out what Symbionnes means, which I vaguely assumed for my entire life was like some reference to a 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. Yeah, so the timing of this is really interesting and it starts because Patty Hurst is kidnapped in February of 1974 and a little less than six months before that in Stockholm, Sweden. On August 23, 1973, a bank robber named Jan Erik Olsen 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. 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 this is another interesting thing in this, too, is that you watch Swedish authorities dealing with a hostage taking bank robbery situation and you're like, oh, there are various moments where you think Sweden is a different country. I can't remotely expect in what way it's different. 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 you're able, 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 taking the side of their captors was one where they were being treated in the scheme of things relatively well

by the captors. So he walks into the bank, he locks it down, he locks the doors, I assume. He evacuates almost everyone who's in there, but he keeps some hostages for himself. Were they tellers or were they customers? I don't know if they were tellers, but they were workers in the bank. They were workers in the bank, and so he deliberately keeps them. And then they start calling the media and telling their story to reporters and TV news. 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. Wait, how? Is that like on speed dial at the bank? You're just like, dear prime minister. 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. 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. 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, Jacinda, the prime minister. And Jacinda, the prime minister, was like sitting a few rows ahead of them also in coach.

Small countries of acutus. They are, yeah. So I think in New Zealand, too, probably, you could just call the prime minister if you were a hostage in a bank and get 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. So that makes sense. She's starting to sympathize with the hostage shakers because she's in a safety situation in which they're in the same danger right now, I guess. Yeah. And I think that's a big part of it is that they are not their safety or, you know, from the beginning, they know in a functional way that their safety is linked to the safety of their captors.

Which I guess just creates like a fundamental us versus them type of scenario that would, of course, build a little bit of team spirit. Yeah. They're in the bank for six days. So by the end of it, things start getting kind of messy. And 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 that they each have roles in. And so Kristen talking to the Prime Minister, Olaf says that she's, 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. Olsen, the robber, is sitting here and he is protecting us from the police.

Mm-hmm. So you can see it sort of starting to form that like he becomes the gorilla daddy who's like protecting them from the evil interlopers. I can also tell you, instead of just making an off-coloring joke, which is my first impulse, that gorilla daddy like was a viable exploitation film genre in the 70s because of Patty Hearst to skip ahead momentarily. There were several Patty Hearst themed exploitation films playing on the erotics, as it were, of the situation.

So yeah, gorilla daddy, it begins. So wait, so that's six days. What do the hostage takers want during this time? 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, when after six days, the police eventually get them out by drilling holes in the vault and putting in tear gas, which 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. You know, 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 structure and she like, 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 captors visited them there. Oh, wow. And so I think one of the reasons that this became as well known in the US 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 kind of 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 vault and asked Olson, who was 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 like walk around, she could walk around and be free, but was on a leash that felt grateful to him for taking her up on a leash.

Jesus. 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 show, to tell them how many hostages there were. And she held up her hand and showed, you know, four fingers and showed that there were four hostages. And she said later that she felt like a traitor at the time for doing that.

Wow. Yeah. So did any of them, did any of them recant afterwards? Like I can see how in an intense hostage 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. Like I don't sympathize with these guys anymore.

Or did the sympathy last? It lasted. And they, and in these quotes from these, from this article, you can see them 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 kind of explaining it in a way to suggest that, you know, they didn't really feel it, which I don't think is 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. Did the hostage takers at that time have any kind of political program? Not as far as I know and not that they mentioned.

So it's interesting too that we then import this to the U.S. and use it to talk about cases where often there's some sort of a political valence. Right, because I can see in a hostage situation if the person taking me hostage is like 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 cause, I might start to really like them. Whereas it's interesting that this is just money. Like you start, you start to sympathize with these people who like just wanted money

and held me captive for six days. Like it's weird that that would create a sense of sympathy. Yeah, and what I thought about as I was trying to figure out what this experience was like for these hostages was dog day afternoon. That's the hostage taking movie in New York City, right? Yeah, where Al Pacino comes in and attempts to rob the bank and it doesn't work out. And he got, you know, has to surrender at the end. And it's like one of those half cocked bank robbery scheme movies.

Because some of the descriptions of Olson, the bank robber in Stockholm reminded me of that Al Pacino character because he's, you know, 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. The monopoly on state violence. Right. If I were one of the tellers in dog day afternoon and there was sweaty incompetent Al Pacino

trying a little bit incompetently 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. Like you seem a little bit bonded if you're caring about women being on their periods. What you think is also speaks to the time that this happened when I think the idea of a man being anything than completely terrified by a woman's period was suspect.

So was this, was it called Stockholm syndrome? Immediately, was it the New Yorker that coined that term? So while this was happening, a Swedish psychiatrist, Nils Begerot, 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 what, especially in the 60s, we're talking about that in the context of cults and that kind of thing. But the term that this Swedish psychiatrist applies to the situation,

the bank is the normalm-storg 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. 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 kind of coming up with it on the fly? He's coming up with it 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 of this,

the symptoms that make it a syndrome. Because 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. Right. It's not a disease. It's like a specific thing. Right. Well, and a syndrome is a grouping of symptoms. So the interesting thing about, like 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 in 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 in this grouping of similar circumstances, but they're not always the same circumstances. So what are his symptoms and what are their circumstances? So, siting 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 and that would be involved. Not trying to escape when the opportunity is presented to you. And siting with your captors against their enemies and taking on their enemies as your own enemies. And again, this is not a DSM thing. This is not

really so much of an official, you know, psychiatrically studied thing. And there isn't a lot of metadata on this. What we have when we talk about Stockholm syndrome or analyses 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 so one of the, and then people will describe it in different ways, but 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, you know, in this bank case, clearly it was about

witnessing the humanity of the people who were holding you hostage. And 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 is something that the human psyche does in a situation where you have to, in some ways, believe in a way that you wouldn't believe in other circumstances, that this person has your best interest at heart. 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, right? You're actually starting to like these people, not necessarily just kind of rooting for them against the people

with the tear gas. 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. 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 a like extremely specific set of circumstances, right? 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. Yeah. And so few of these kind of DSM type phenomena

are situational in that way. Yeah. And there's something weird about saying that someone had or didn't have Stockholm syndrome, because it's not something that I think you have in the way that you have something like, you know, 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 this under these sets of circumstances where we've observed it. We started studying this in the 70s. And there are cases that seem to complicate or challenge this trend. So there was a case in the 80s 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 continue to make things difficult for them and would be taking photographs of the situation. So he could show them to the police and was like a 12 angry men situation, like the one person who's going against the group, the lone holdout. And I 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. So like 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? 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 Hearst, and then I also didn't realize before looking at this, is that the Patty Hearst saga went on for years. Because she was kidnapped on February 4, 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. So who is Patty Hearst? Patty Hearst is the beautiful heiress to the Hearst fortune and a member of a descendant of William Randolph Hearst.

Newspaper guy. So worth the modern equivalent of billions. So she inherits all this wealth and she she's famous before the kidnapping, right? I don't think she was famous in that way before the kidnapping. She was 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 was 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 Symbianese Liberation Army, which is a very grandiose term because they only have a handful of members. They're really a Symbianese Liberation. Minivan. Exactly. You know, there's the search for Patty and no one knows where she is or what's happening for a couple of months. 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 Symbianese Liberation front thing until we find out until

months, months, months later. 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 rob a bank in April of that year. She's been gone a couple of months and then the first, and again, this is the media intruding in interesting ways. 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, you know, 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. You know, she disappears. She's the face on the missing signs. And then we see her

again. And she's Tanya because that's her, her Symbianese Liberation Army name. Baller. And yeah, and I think one of the problems with it really is that she looks great. Like you look at it and it just, it's like bank robber chic. I mean, she looks like Faye Dunaway and Bonnie and Clyde in those images. Yeah. And she's a 19 year old girl. She's attractive. It's like perfectly packaged to appeal to the People Magazine reading public. Yeah. A week after the bank robbery, April 22nd, 1974, the SLA releases 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 describes what the SLA did with the robbery is that they forced the corporate

state to help finance the revolution. I like her. Right? That's the thing. She just, she ended up with like 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. I, 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, you know, 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 there was, 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 are holding them views in 1974. Oh, just all that anti-corporate, anti-system type of views. Yeah, consciousness is terrifying to the ruling class. Like consciousness is terrifying to the ruling class. Young people had reached sort of a consensus on that at this point in America. Yeah, it's Watergate year, right? I mean, she's not that far outside of the mainstream. It is Watergate year.

What did the Liberation Army actually want? I think they just wanted to wage war against America and they had smaller manifestos within that. But that was, 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. Okay. 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 the Hearst are like, all right, 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. Oh my God. Speaking not of the Symbionese Liberation Army, but of the poor. Charming. Yeah. Good old Reagan, just doing the empathy quotes, just bringing them out. That's the thing. So the bank robbery happens. She releases this statement. And then is this just like a huge, a huge deal in the country? I mean, this must be front page news everywhere. Yeah. And she was on the cover of Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine, many times her face is everywhere. I mean, that Tanya images, that's one of the iconic images of this period, I think it's as iconic as a portrait of Mao people, you know, some people are saying right on Patty and some people are horrified. And then what happens that

we kind of 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 lam and no one knows where she is for 16 months. Wow. And then the police finally find her living in a housing 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 Army

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 free will 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 kind of the first time that we see Stockholm syndrome come up as will jurors by this or not, basically. Oh, so that's how it gets popularized is as a kind of excuse for her robbing banks.

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, like intoxication, something like that, where you actually have numbers that you can point to. But something like battered women syndrome in the late 70s is kind of 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. 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 syndromeed into these beliefs. Like those seem like opposites to me.

How would you separate those ideas? 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? She's saying, she's saying I was abused to the point where I sort of was brainwashed? 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, you know, 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 and imagine myself in that position, what I try and think about, 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 real belief? It's circumstantial belief, but is it not real? And then that's when you get into this whole, like, the system is the problem, right? That if we grow 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. 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. Well, yeah, that it sort of installs certain beliefs, like the circumstances in which you grow up install certain beliefs in you in the same way that being trapped in a closet would install certain beliefs in you too. 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 gotten 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 Olsen did, which is when in the bank robbery in Sweden, they ran out of food because the police hadn't sent them rations in a while. He had three pairs left over and he cut up his pairs 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,

you know, 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 like how many times have you known someone or have you been this person where like your friend is in a relationship and everything's are like generally fine and then like they actually 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 you're saving face but because you couldn't really accept, you know, that all of it was as bad as it was while it was happening. Right and part of you

knew how bad it was and you knew that by talking about it other people would too. Yeah. But what's weird to me about this is that the bank robbery situation seems so different than Patty Hearst's situation. Yeah. 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 like a weird, the Stockholm 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 it was the central purpose of the SLA was to get her to say these things in the audio statement was to get her to rob a bank with them. That's a really good point. So it's weird that F. Lee Bailey used that as an excuse when they're two completely different scenarios. Well and he apparently did a bad job generally with that trial. Like he apparently during the closing arguments he was holding on to one of his hands with the other because he might have 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. So she's arguing I didn't actually commit these crimes because I was sort of coerced into them. So does that land? Is she acquitted? 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 it's and so she's 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. This is always very indicative of like the larger discourse. Yes. Well it's like you know you're reading about something and you're thinking about it you're like oh yeah I get that like 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 you know 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 to be not be held fully accountable for her actions just as 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 like how do you freely join something after it kidnaps you. 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 gonna give you the choice we're gonna leave the membership

card under the door it's up to you. And while you're in here like between rapes you can just think about what you really believe politically and offer us your considered opinion as a consenting adult. Why did people not like why was that hard for people to believe at the time like looking back now it's pretty obvious seeming that like if someone is raping you and holding you in these terrible conditions that like you'd 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. 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 kind of

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 Tanya 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 you know we all really want to be out living 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 go go commit violent crimes does everyone else want to commit violent crimes is that what we all secretly want right like she gave in to her impulse yeah as opposed to being coerced 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 like 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 what was the testimony from her captors I mean not that you know I'm inclined to believe them but like what did they say I mean

unfortunately a lot of them got murdered so they can't tell us what happened because they got killed in a shootout um 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 one of the she did a playboy interview at some point in the 70s which I read a long time ago and one of the things I found really charming and human about it was that she talked about you know getting coerced into and I think it was a combination right 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

Effley 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 no way wow but you know under these co she's being coerced into accepting her role in a violent and abusive power structure and as a member of you know the Symbianese 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 bickers 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 60s and 70s that were complicated because they had genuinely humanist ideas that were knit up with violence and abuse of uses of power and were often you know run by men who had by young disenfranchised men who had been losers and every other thing that they had tried that doesn't sound familiar at all men starting revolutions because they fail everything else that's right i'm glad we're done with that well and to to quote charles manson mass killer it's a job what can i say jesus christ and it's like right charlie couldn't get a job

so what is the afterlife of stock home syndrome what what happens with that term afterwards well this made me think of the first time i encountered the term stock home 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 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 like kissing on a beach and james bond goes i thought christmas came only once a year oh no and 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 and then they could have called her like arbor day too it's not whatever there were other like 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 du jour of that movie and the explanation that they give in script is that she has stock home syndrome and there's i remember a scene where she she's always wearing these chunky earrings and she takes one off and part of her ear lobe is gone because of the tortures that she suffered on the way to getting stock home syndrome and i remember as a kid being like oh my god stock home syndrome how do you get that and i think the consensus that we have as

americans to the extent that we think about stock home syndrome is it's something that you can come down with you know like the flu like it could happen to any of us at any time yeah that 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 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 stock home 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 stock home syndrome label to three completely different situations i think so i mean an example of that too is sudden infant death syndrome that essentially just translates to a baby died 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 you know close a case and move forward we're applying stock home syndrome as a defense strategy in patty herce 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

effley 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 or would it's a story of coercion i mean the difference between the bank robbery and patty herce seems like the coercion it was voluntary the people the hostages in sweden they voluntarily came to sympathize with their hostage shakers whereas patty hurst didn't well and do you think that it's 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 know and you can see some of the sla's points also in the fact that when she's finally rescued from this abusive gorilla army that she'd been kidnapped by she's thrown in jail and then treated like some sort of paragon of wicked of the hippie movement gone wrong you know who i blame for all this who the new yorker i mean i'm always finding the way to blame the media for everything now as a member of it kind of our theme yeah people love to have little names for things and little rules for things especially people who are like us over educated tend to be left wing interested in science interested understanding societal phenomena we love to have like these little rules these little terms

that we can kind of throw out that allow us to explain things i keep thinking of also in the new yorker the 10 000 hour rule oh yeah right that this idea that there's kind of no such things inborn talent that 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 kind of hey there's this rule talent 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 where 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 we 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 is not the caveat 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 like 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 oh like 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 that it was based on literally one thing happening and then the term just kind of ran away with itself and became applied to all of these other random situations so maybe i don't blame new yorker necessarily like these are not mendacious people who wrote the article and it's the kind of article that i would have written like i've 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 phenomena 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 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 woman syndrome too because what's there's a very quick backlash against that and the big case that gets us into this public consciousness is the francy and hughes case in 1978 in michigan where a woman who had been consistently and horrifically abused by her husband for i think 15 years finally just one day in 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

ferro faucet filmed the burning bed and then drove her kids and herself to the police station and turned herself in and went to trial yeah 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 use the phrase open season and are talking about being worried that it's going to be open season on men and on husbands it's like the me too thing at the witch hunt you can't even like hug your secretary anymore it's the same kind of rhetoric yeah and you know and they're coming they're coming for all the men imagine being worried about that like you can't

even you can't even beat your wife anymore without her trying to kill you like imagine that being right concern yeah and and also again betraying this unspoken belief that doesn't make very much sense from where i'm standing of you know 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 and it's like maybe you shouldn't treat your wife in a way that makes her want to murder you there's also the question of whether the term syndrome is really doing anything there right yeah 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 like as you mentioned with the airplane hijacking not everybody gets quote-unquote Stockholm syndrome it's pseudoscientific and yeah that's that's a much better word than what i was saying yes it's pseudoscientific yeah and there's and then also you know as men get afraid about women killing them all the time uh in the early 80s

then there's a backlash and women start getting handed maybe even stiffer sentences and they would have gotten a few years prior because there's a sense oh because they wanted deter women from killing their abusive husbands like we can't stand for this yes like if we if we don't start handing out harsher sentences then when and it's like what maybe we could do something to mitigate domestic violence in this country but whatever that's the social problem they wanted to solve women killing their husbands not the husband part yeah and and this idea of you know now that we have this defined battered woman 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 she

doesn't have the excuse of having been sick or having the syndrome that made her kill her husband you know she's faking and so it's something that you can apply kind of to whatever you want and for the same reason you can also claim that it doesn't apply kind of whenever you want right so it happens for some people and doesn't happen for other people which makes it not all that useful as an explanatory factor yeah i keep thinking of 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 like frogs aren't stupid frogs jump out of water when it gets too hot in the same way you would like

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 gonna get out of this bathtub like 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 that things incremental changes don't get noticed to the same extent as extreme switches right so kind of 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 is that it's kind of 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 that we now have a cute little catchphrase for that that describes this actual social phenomena that syndrome is kind of the wrong word for it i guess it's more just like stockholm phenomenon or yeah stockholm sometimes that sometimes people do this and sometimes they don't but it's before i guess the early 70s it we didn't think that people would actually come to sympathize with their captors yeah and 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 like 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 like more than they had before and poisoning wasn't detectable in an autopsy 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 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 like 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 like what motive could there be like how could she have

how can a woman kill her husband like it doesn't make sense and they would acquit them because they just couldn't wrap their heads around the idea of of of the motive oh my god if only there was some root brick through which we could understand this murder if only there was i don't know a syndrome so uh what did we learn what did we learn about Stockholm syndrome i learned that the incident that we named Stockholm syndrome after was a really less extreme than at this point pretty much all of the situations that we've applied it to you learn that you should rob a bank in sweden rather than the united states yeah and then if i like call the police and say hey we need some menstrual supplies in here they'll be like oh my god we're we're

not dealing with a garden variety criminal this is a complicated situation they're like let's get the prime minister on the phone hang on let's let's patch in Olaf 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 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 you also you shouldn't be too pretty if you're a woman who's kidnapped and raped and forced to

commit a crime like don't be pretty because then people will really be suspicious of you