![]() ![]() She also lied and tried to defend her abductor when questioned. She has two children with her abductor and has never tried to escape. Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped at the age of 11 and has been a hostage for almost 18 years. This psychological paradox is called the ‘Stockholm syndrome’, a term coined by the criminologist and psychologist Nils Bejerot.Īn automatic emotional reaction, developed at an unconscious level, to the trauma created by being a ‘victim’. In the course of the long psychological sessions to which the hostages were subjected, they manifested a positive feeling towards the criminals who had ‘given them back their lives’ and to whom they felt indebted for the generosity shown. The story hit the front pages of newspapers all over the world.ĭuring their captivity, the hostages feared the police more than they did the hostage-takers themselves, as psychological interviews later showed (this was the first case in which psychological intervention was also carried out on hostage-takers). The name of the Stockholm syndrome has its origins in 1973, when two escaped convicts from the Stockholm prison (Jan-Erik Olsson, 32 years old and Clark Olofsson, 26 years old) attempted a robbery at the headquarters of the “Sveriges Kredit Bank” in Stockholm and took four employees (three women and one man) hostage. In situations where the abduction is carried out on these delicate subjects (not well structured, not very solid personalities, such as especially those of children or adolescents), maybe in order to have “a slave or a slave girl”, the abductor tries to depersonalise the victim, through a sort of “brainwashing”, convincing him/her that none of his/her loved ones will care about him/her, and that only the jailer will take care of him/her and stay by his/her side. Very often Stockholm syndrome can be found in situations of violence against women, child abuse and survivors of concentration camps ![]() The victim suffering from Stockholm syndrome, during the mistreatment, has a positive feeling towards his or her aggressor, which can go as far as falling in love and total voluntary submission, thus establishing a sort of alliance and solidarity between victim and perpetrator. Yet, from a clinical psychology perspective, it would be interesting to try to investigate its causes, investigating the attachment styles and behavioural profiles of subjects who have experienced the state of victim-perpetrator identification, so as to allow mental health professionals to look with different eyes at similar situations identified by studies: members of sects, prison staff, abused women and, of course, hostages. Stockholm syndrome is not codified in any diagnostic manual, since, as highlighted above, it is not considered a disorder in its own right Stockholm syndrome is not considered to be a real disorder, but rather a set of emotional and behavioural activations peculiar to the functioning of some individuals subjected to particularly traumatic events, such as a kidnapping or a long series of physical and mental abuses. Stockholm syndrome consists in creating an emotional bond with the aggressor as a possible survival strategy in dangerous situations ![]()
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