# The Stockholm Syndrome: victims come to identify with their abusers.

# The Stockholm Syndrome: victims come to identify with their abusers. I think of the Stockholm Syndrome as a special category of commitment through action.

On August 23, 1973, three women and one man were taken hostage in one of the largest banks in Stockholm. They were held for six days by two ex-convicts who threatened their lives but also showed them kindness. To the world's surprise, all of the hostages strongly resisted the government's efforts to rescue them and were quite eager to defend their captors. Indeed, several months after the hostages were saved by the police, they still had warm feelings for the men who threatened their lives. Two of the women eventually got engaged to the captors (Trigiani).

As this apparently bizarre behavior began to be seen in similar situations, notably when heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the terrorist SLA, and eventually helped the gang rob banks, it became known as the “Stockholm Syndrome.” The dynamic is that, in situations where a killer holds my life in his hands, I’m going to do everything he tells me so that he doesn’t kill me. More than that, I’m going to study him very closely, to try to figure out some way to link my survival to something that’s important to him. I learn to see the world through his eyes, and to find little ways to please him.

As the days go by and he doesn’t kill me, or maybe even shows me some tiny consideration, like letting me go to the bathroom, I come to feel gratitude and/or relief that my efforts to manipulate him seem to be working. I may come to see rescue attempts as a threat, both because I’ve identified with the killer, and because, practically, I’m very likely to die in a shoot-out. I am as helpless as an infant, and the man with the gun is for me the most powerful person in the world, perhaps more powerful than all the police and helicopters outside. There may well be an element of “cognitive dissonance” here as well (see “Man in the Moon”, above)-- it’s very hard to maintain intense anger that can’t be expressed, or suck up so abjectly to someone I hate. The stakes are so high, the stress is so great, that my dependence on and intimate knowledge of the killer comes to look something like love. This massive change of heart can take place in just a few days of terror, and can last for months and years.

Not surprisingly, inducing dependence through abuse is the foundation of ancient and modern interrogation. Perhaps the U.S. troops who rape and beat Iraqi inmates were having fun, but they are also most certainly following the orders of their superiors.

The circumstances here seem to contradict the “taking responsibility” requirement-- how can folks literally under the gun be said to acquiesce in their own captivity? But I will speculate that the “Syndrome” may represent the victims’ attempt to reassert their own capacity to act. Having to be nice to a killer is stressful enough, but perhaps the greatest dissonance here is being ejected without warning from life as a free adult to one as a helpless dependent. While in fact under strict command, the captives try to assert some control by pleasing the guy with the gun. Unprepared, without a chance to develop a collective analysis with their co-prisoners, this illusion of a relationship with the killer may be their only means to hold onto hope and selfhood. Maybe they do come to accept their subordination, believing that it is not absolute, that they have some leverage.

The Stockholm Syndrome model has been applied to people in other kinds of situations as well --women beaten by their partners, members of enclave religions-- people who have little chance to develop an understanding of their subordination that does not blame them for it. Once enough people are afraid, terrorists deploy the vary old and very effective strategy of granting tiny privileges to certain of their victims to keep in line the rest. Perhaps a terrorist society spawns devotees like tribbles on the Enterprise. But that’s not why I love Pres. Halliburton.

Defying reality happens only under certain circumstances. Persisting in faith requires both social support and willing action on our part. If we are coerced, we have little commitment to the faith. If we have no allies and no authorization, it’s easy to abandon.


• Sweeping back the sea: the endless task of justifying injustice.
I don't know how King Canute ended up with a broom on a beach, trying to sweep the ocean back from England, but the tale served as the popular expression of extreme futility.

If the idea of cognitive dissonance has any merit at all, people in unfree societies live in a constant state of stress. We have to hear and tell lies all the time. Like an autoimmune system in overdrive, we are in constant repair mode, desperately trying to patch the holes in our stories, to fill in the abyss between our ideas and the rude intrusions of the real world. “Merton suggests that a major source of tension in modern society lies in the fact that members of the subordinate class internalize the same values as the dominant class, but lack the means for realizing them” (Parkin 80). Just as likely, seems to me, is the tension between our ideas of fairness and the kicks in the teeth we get every day. This set of essays is in large part a frantic effort to resolve that stress in my own life.

If we lack access to alternative understandings of the world, people may try to resolve the fact of being pushed around by working extra hard to convince ourselves and our neighbors how swell everything is:

. . . under certain circumstances members of disadvantaged groups would be even more likely than members of advantaged groups to support the status quo . . . . If there is indeed a motivation to justify the system to reduce ideological dissonance and defend against threats to the system’s legitimacy, then it may be that those who suffer the most because of the system are also those who would have the most to explain, justify, and rationalize (Jost 350-1).

One of the women in my GED class showed different reactions at different times. Caroline often (mis)quoted the Bible, retailed her pastor’s inoculatory, dishonest “joke” about atheist teachers browbeating Christian kids in school, and was quick to jump to Halliburton’s defense any time the other learners got too critical. Other times she would flatly reject what she’d learned in church --about sex, for instance-- and freely admitted changing her mind about welfare after enrolling herself and meeting other women in similar situations. There were so many things going on with her health, schooling and kids. Caroline was always anxious, but she was figuring things out.

Finally one day, after she’d been in class three months, we watched a video about immigrants-- PBS’ “New Americans”. Actually, I’d delayed showing the tape until I knew she’d be in class, because I thought she’d have insightful comments for the rest of the class. After all, her first lover, who she continues to refer to fondly, was an older Arab guy. The segment I showed included a heart-rending scene of a Mexican family parting, pop heading off to el Norte.

Caroline was having none of it. I can only speculate that she thought I was being manipulative, and/or it disrupted her view of immigrants as the easy target for her anger. Possibly she saw that she and these Mexicans had a lot in common, and couldn’t accept that just yet. I don’t know. But she never came back to class, except a couple times to say hello.

That she quit doesn’t indicate one way or the other what she learned, only that it was hard. What I learned was that the same person might be ready at one moment to hear something new, and not at another time.

So, while Scott and others dispute the extent to which we adopt the lies of our masters, certainly we can see such adoptions sometimes. And to cope with the stress of diverging beliefs and experience, we can change our beliefs or we can try to reshape the world to conform to what we have in our heads. The latter is what happens, according to Festinger, when “disconfirmations” lead to even greater efforts on behalf of the cause. I mentioned above the cases of the Xhosa and the Millerites. Here’s an example from near where I live: in the late 1800s the first coal boom went bust in Middlesboro, Kentucky, costing thousands of people their jobs, land and life savings.

In the first stage of the weakening of the Company, the reaction of the townspeople was not rebellion but even more overt expressions of loyalty. While questions of the competence and possible fraud of [Alexander] Arthur’s management led to his dismissal in London, the relatively powerless, those in Middlesboro, greeted him upon his return with enthusiastic celebration, and refused to believe that they had been misled. Only as the effects of the crash became more apparent, did challenges develop (Gaventa 77).


• The Green Zone: think inside the boxes.
We don't usually find ourselves in such dire circumstances. We have other mechanisms to cope with the day to day frictions of our stories and beliefs. We especially like to compartmentalize: slice up our lives and our views of the world into many separate categories, so it's harder to tell when the pieces don't fit together; so our contradictions don't constantly get in our face.

I was reminded of this in a small way at a teachers’ conference in Birmingham. One prof and his students gave a talk about the appearance of public text in many languages, in even the smallest communities: signs and documents in Spanish and Asian languages, especially. How wonderfully diverse we are! they beamed. When I related my experience that these same signs freak out a lot of Anglos and fuel the anti-immigrant backlash, the presenters back pedalled furiously. I am not a politician, said the professor, and recounted the tale of a racist teacher who helped her Latina student. As I dabbed away tears of joy, I nevertheless pointed out that tolerant personal behavior does not always translate into policy. I said, I’m not a politician either, but I’m a citizen. Members of the audience were not buying my argument: what we do every day in schools helps change the social climate in the long run, they said. Our work in the schools is bottom up change, offered the professor’s wife-- although as English teachers few of us deal more than superficially with Anglo students or other teachers.

The attitude seems to be widespread among teachers, and perhaps among other public sector employees: we just work here, we express our community values through our charitable work, we don’t need to have a hand in policy. For sure, as employees of our fellow citizens, we are obliged to be specially scrupulous about how we take part in politics. Just as generals are supposed to keep their complaints to themselves, Christian teachers, for instance, have to take care how they talk about religion. But I don’t get the impression that my colleagues feel gagged by their professonal positions, and yearn to burst forth with proposals and pronouncements.

Nor do we think of students as winking out of existence at 3 PM, to reappear the next day at 7:45. We are well aware that homes and neighborhoods are the first classrooms. Somehow, though, we don’t feel we can or should have any affect on those conditions. We tend to believe that our classroom practice and personal empathy will affect these kids far more than the fact that their parents might not have jobs, might not be able to read, might be in jail. Maybe we’ve been so intensely compartmentalized we can’t see how much such conditions are the direct outcomes of public policy.

Later that day in Birmingham I wondered if the colleagues from that session were among the teachers trooping aboard the buses making the afternoon run to the city’s civil rights historic district, where you can take pictures of churches and statues of dead people, and show them in class on King day.

On the one hand, compartmentalizing is absolutely necessary to carry out our daily tasks. I don't worry about workers' wages or environmental impacts when I buy toothpaste, though logically, the manufacture and distribution of hundreds of millions of tubes must affect both. I don't expect to find happiness in my choice of toothpaste, either, or a sense of satisfaction in a job well done. I don't wear running clothes to work, or screen my dentists for their politics. I try to make my grab-bag of ideas and actions operate consistently, but in the meantime, I need to make it through every day.

I carry the data of stratigraphy, mountain formation, erosion, and the immense areas of volcanic origin in one compartment of my thinking, the narrative to Genesis in another, with a water-tight bulkhead in between. . . . I cannot harmonize the two. But that does not make me reject one or the other (Darwin critic Theodore Graebner, cited in Numbers 107).

Compartmentalizing is also a primary way to deal with fear and pain. I could cross a high railroad trestle only by ignoring the long drop and the hyperventilation and telling myself the structure must be perfectly capable of supporting my weight. I can go to the dentist only because I know the present pain will help me avoid worse pain in the future. I get through hard days by relying on skills, and going on autopilot.

Whichever slick or scabrous surface we're hanging on to at any given moment, the world is a seamless whole (above the quantum scale, anyway), even if we can only deal with parts of it. I've met folks who try to integrate everything, to infuse every decision with their politics and sense of beauty, and they have a hard time getting things done.

On the other hand, a lot of times we separate what we need to deal with together: our incomes and expenses; today's behavior and our long-term goals; our politics and the way we treat our families and employees; et cetera. Clinchy et al describe "constructed knowledge" as a way women can integrate their own understandings and values with what they learn from others, and constructivist women as particularly intent on dealing with all the parts of their lives as an integrated whole, however difficult that is to do in practice (1986 Chapter 7).

Some political workers, too, emphasize the unity of their aims, and the dangers of too narrow a focus. I remember a revolutionary saying how hard folks in Nicaragua had fought to get gender issues onto the revolutionary agenda, and how the reply from on high was always, We have to establish the Revolution first. Then we can take care of women's issues. About the same time, a Palestinian activist said, "Look at our Palestinian leaders, they are all men! They think that women's liberation will have to wait, it mustn't get in the way of the national liberation struggle. They seem to believe that one excludes the other . . . ." (Bulkin 168). This has been a common tune in leftish circles in my country, too, and not just about gender. There are tactical reasons for particular groups to concentrate on particular issues at certain times. But as a movement we need to fight hard on all fronts, because success or failure in one area strengthens or undermines our work in another. We fail when we lose sight of the whole struggle.

A kind of compartmentalization may account for what we saw in October 2008, when, according to the media, the economic crisis pushed “independent” voters (boy, is that ever a misnomer) into the embrace of mama Obama, presumably the same folks people who’d previously been drawn to McCain for his supposed credentials on security issues. Seems to me like a massive disconnect, the notion that economics and war are separate issues. It may be that they require somewhat different skills to manage (in which case, it’s clear Pres. Halliburton had neither set). Or maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way. Coddling the in-group and abusing outsiders --say, by killing them and distributing the spoils-- is in fact a unified view, older than the Bible. Is that what my fellow citizens require?

The ruling institutions are careful to keep us in boxes. They're especially good at separating our practice from our ideals, and making it easy for us to give up responsibility.

. . . I must have had the feeling that it was no affair of mine when I heard the people around me declaring an open season on Jews, Freemason, and Social Democrats, or Jehovah’s Witnesses. I thought I was not implicated if I myself did not take part.
The ordinary [Nazi] party member was being taught that grand policy was much too complex for him to judge it. Consequently, one felt one was being represented, never called upon to take personal responsibility. The whole structure of the system was aimed at preventing conflicts of conscience from even arising. . . . Worse still was the restriction of responsibility to one’s own field. Everyone kept to his own group-- of architects, physicians, jurists, technicians, soldiers, or famers. The professional organizations to which everyone had to belong were called chambers (Physicians’ Chamber, Art Chamber), and this term aptly described the way people were immured in isolated, closed-off areas of life (Speer 65).

A striking example: Rev. Martin Neimoller, arrested for resisting the Nazification of the churches, offered to join the German navy (he’d fought in the First World War) (R. Evans 231). He didn’t like the Nazis, but by god he was a patriot, and determined to prove it.

Even the most exquisite cultural practices can help us compartmentalize. Kerr writes about a commonly-held sense of beauty in Japan:

Other factors, too, make it unlikely that environmental destruction will become a mainstream political issue. One is the deep-rooted Japanese concentration on the instant or small detail, as in a haiku poem. This is beautifully expressed in the paintings on the sliding doors at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto: a few parrots, their feathers brightly painted in red and green, sit on gray branches in a landscape drawn in stark shades of black ink on white paper. The Zen message of the painting is that the parrots are the focus of our attention-- hence we see them in color, while the background black-and-white trees are nearly invisible to the mind's eye. The architect Takeyama Sei says that it is this ability to 'narrow their focus' that leads the Japanese people to ignore the ugliness in their environment. You can admire a mountainside and not see the gigantic power lines marching over it, or take pleasure in a rice paddy without being disturbed by the aluminum-clad factory looming over it (74).

The religions I know of have long practiced living in the world while renouncing it. What about those rich Saudis who school in the U.S. and go back to their freakishly sexist and authoritarian society? Jim Crow, caste, purdah-- we have a million ways to separate people organizationally in order to dehumanize them. Occupiers and jihadists collaborated to set up Baghdad's "Green Zone" among Hussein's palaces, as an uneasy haven from Iraq's realities.

Above all, corporate hierarchies depend on subordinates following orders without question, no matter how devastating those might be, and have organized accordingly.

A central activity in accounting frauds --the quarterly effort to manipulate the financial results-- was encoded in a way that encouraged one to treat it as a regular task that did not need to be thought out. . . . The importance of routine for normalized corruption was evident in the irritation (or rage) that was directed toward those who broke with it. A vivid example can be seen at WorldCom, where CFO Scott Sullivan sent the following e-mail to a staffer (and the employee's supervisor) when the employee prepared a budget using actual (as opposed to manufactured) cost estimates: 'This is complete, complete garbage. . . . What am I supposed to do with this? What have we been doing for the last six months? . . . This is a real work of trash.' Routinization limited what could be discussed (and with whom). . . . When the exercise of power was across firm boundaries [as when banks, law firms, and accountants collaborated in the fraud], actors who were strategically positioned in networks aggressively promoted their own story lines (Tillman 225).

Perhaps our crowning achievement has been the bureaucratization of mass murder, invented probably by the first priest-kings. From the Aztec Wars of the Flowers to Auschwitz and the Gulag Archipelago, to the institutions we know & love today, extermination has become relatively neat and sanitary, even mechanized, for at least the mid-level exterminators, and the folks who pay their commissions.

Routinization operates both at the level of the individual actor and at the organizational level. Individual job performance is broken down into a series of discrete steps, most of them carried out in automatic, regularized fashion. It becomes easy to forget the nature of the product that emerges from this process. When Lieutenant Calley said of [the massacre at] My Lai that it was ‘no big deal,’ he probably implied that it was all in a day’s work. Organizationally, the task is divided among different offices, each of which has responsibility for a small portion of it. This arrangement diffuses responsibility and limits the amount and scope of decision making that is necessary. There is no expectation that the moral implications will be considered at any of these points, nor is there any opportunity to do so. . . . By proceeding in routine fashion --processing papers, exchanging memos, diligently carrying out their assigned tasks-- the different units mutually reinforce each other in the view that what is going on must be perfectly normal, correct, and legitimate (Kelman 18).

Nor, we should note, was it just officers who thought "no big deal":

. . . it can be argued that My Lai was not an atrocity --at least, if it is argued that an atrocity is taken to be something freakish, something quite apart from the normal events coming before and after it. My Lai, on the contrary, was an unusually pure example of the nature of the war in Viet Nam and departed little --if at all-- from common American practice (Knightley 393).

But, before My Lai, anyone seeking evidence of the nature of the Viet Nam War need only have consulted official records. . . .
Correspondents . . . . were able to recall, after the My Lai story broke, incidents which they themselves had witnessed, and I have spoken to some who agree that the killing of Vietnamese civilians was a well-known fact. They did not write this, because the killing of civilians was not unusual either on a small or on a large scale, and because their public, certainly in the United States . . . was not ready to listen” (395).

A.P. reporter Peter Arnett explained his reasoning:

I watched hooches burning down; I saw the civilian dead. I did not write about war crimes either. We took pictures of those burning buildings, we told of the civilian dead and how they died, but we didn’t make judgments because we were witnesses, and, like witnesses to a robbery, accident or murder, surely it was not for us to be judge and jury (397).


On the other hand, Pastor Martin Niemoller was able to use similarly fine distinctions to defend Jews against Nazi attacks. Since God had cursed the Jews, he argued, it wasn't up to German Christians to persecute them. Rather, they should follow Jesus' example and love their enemies (Richard Evans 228). Evidently such a compelling argument was lost on his fellow citizens. Fortunately, current pro-gay campaigns in my country --we love the homasexshals so much, we want to save them from God's eternal damnation-- has brought about an unprecedented acceptance and mutual respect among gay people and rightist Christians.