Viral Tweet Exposes Sexist Origins of Stockholm Syndrome
Sometimes, very rarely, social media opens your eyes to something you didn’t know or had never really examined, and today that thing was … Stockholm Syndrome. Twitter user Sarah Mohammed shared the following excerpt from the book See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence by Jess Hill and it’s completely realigning how many of us understand Stockholm Syndrome.
I actually cannot believe this origin story for “Stockholm Syndrome” which is basically just a “myth invented to discredit women victims of violence by a psychiatrist with an obvious conflict of interest, whose first instinct was to silence the woman questioning his authority” pic.twitter.com/DN62JezT95
— Sarah Mohammed (@sezmohammed) April 21, 2020
Stockholm Syndrome is something that’s become a pretty well-known idea, at least since the first time some of us heard about in reference to Sophie Marceau falling in love with her kidnapper Robert Carlyle in 1999’s Bond film The World is Not Enough. We apply the concept that a person (usually a woman) might fall in love (or deeply sympathize) with their captor to a lot of media, and Beauty and the Beast has become such a common example it’s nearly cliche to call out the idea.
And culturally, we don’t go that much deeper into the term. The BBC gives the following quick rundown which is the standard story:
It was 23 August 1973 when the four were taken hostage in the Kreditbanken by 32-year-old career-criminal Jan-Erik Olsson – who was later joined at the bank by a former prison mate. Six days later when the stand-off ended, it became evident that the victims had formed some kind of positive relationship with their captors.
Stockholm Syndrome was born by way of explanation.
But, as we can see in the excerpt in the tweet above, there was a lot of sexism at work in the coining of the term. The hostage situation was mismanaged and most importantly, Nils Bejerot, the psychiatrist who invented the term, never spoke to the woman at the center of it and seems to have coined the term to make himself and the authorities look better.
And it really calls into question how we think of Stockholm Syndrome and how there are so many phrases and ideas in our culture that we don’t examine enough, especially for the subtle ways they undermine women’s agency. Stockholm Syndrome is not a recognized diagnosis or disorder, and there are no accepted criteria for diagnosing it. But that doesn’t stop armchair psychiatrists from misapplying the idea to things like women in abusive relationships.
But Stockholm Syndrome is not the same as abuse, in fact, it’s a potentially very flawed idea that fails to encapsulate all the complexities of human emotion, survival responses, and psychology. The actual accounts of the Stockholm situation are far more about the hostages learning to see their captors as people, and developing empathy (which is what most of us do when we meet people).
It is, essentially, human nature for someone in such a situation to feel (and inspire) empathy for their captors—which would better increase their chances for survival—and to reduce it to a syndrome is a way of reducing women’s feelings and humanity to something both outside of their control, as well as equivalent to mental illness and insanity.
Indeed but the argument is that there’s no need to coign a medical phrase for it because it’s perfectly rational behaviour and calling it a ‘syndrome’ has the effect of undermining the the victim’s account. Kampusch explains it far better than me though!
— Catriona Lexy Campbell (@catrionalexy) April 21, 2020
The conflation of women’s feelings and actions with mental illness has a long and terrible history. Not just in the sense that women’s tendency to be “ruled by their emotions” is the basis for so much sexism, but the very concept of “hysteria” which literally means madness from the uterus. The pernicious idea that being a woman makes our decisions suspect, our perceptions of reality invalid, and our actions not our own is incredibly damaging and yet that kind of sexism is baked deep into our culture.
The fact that the term Stockholm Syndrome was coined as a way to explain away women’s experience and agency, and even used to dismiss other women’s accountability for their own decisions, is very telling. but honestly not surprising. Society goes out of its way all the time to make women seem unhinged or stupid or just incapable of their own decisions. Let’s not allow that to continue.
(via: Sarah Mohammed/Twitter, Image: Disney)
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