It’s called Stockholm syndrome because of a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, in August 1973. During a six-day hostage crisis, four bank employees developed unexpected emotional bonds with the man holding them captive, a reaction that baffled police and the public. A police psychologist coined a new term to explain what he saw, naming it after the city where it happened. But the story behind that name is more complicated, and more controversial, than most people realize.
The 1973 Bank Siege
On August 23, 1973, an armed man entered a bank at Norrmalmstorg square in central Stockholm and took four employees hostage: Birgitta Lundblad, Elisabeth Oldgren, Kristin Enmark, and Sven Säfström. For five days, the hostages were held inside the bank vault while police negotiated outside. When authorities finally ended the standoff with a tear-gas assault on August 28, something strange became apparent: the hostages seemed more afraid of the police than of their captor.
Several of the hostages expressed concern for the robber’s safety. They resisted rescue efforts and later refused to testify against him. One hostage, Kristin Enmark, had called the Swedish prime minister during the siege to criticize how police were handling the situation, arguing that the officers’ aggressive tactics were putting the hostages in greater danger than the gunman was.
Who Created the Term
Nils Bejerot, a Swedish criminologist and psychiatrist, had served as the police’s psychiatric consultant throughout the standoff. After the siege ended, he was asked to explain the hostages’ puzzling behavior. He described it as a psychological phenomenon and labeled it “Norrmalmstorgssyndromet” in Swedish, which was quickly translated into English as “Stockholm syndrome.” The name stuck because it was simple, geographic, and easy to remember.
The concept spread rapidly through media coverage and academic circles. Within a few years, it became a widely referenced explanation for any situation where a captive or abuse victim appeared to side with the person controlling them.
Why the Original Hostages Pushed Back
What gets lost in most retellings is that the hostages had a very different interpretation of their own behavior. Kristin Enmark, the most vocal of the four, argued for decades that the label was invented to discredit her. She had publicly criticized Bejerot by name for the police strategy during the crisis, which she felt had endangered their lives more than the robber did.
Enmark later wrote that authorities “tried to take advantage of us… to hide their own prejudices, mistakes and the fact that they so miserably failed to protect us.” She added: “The fact that they also treated us as mentally ill makes it even worse… they thought that it’s easy to blame us young girls.” In her view, the hostages weren’t irrational. They were reacting to a real threat from a botched police response, and Bejerot pathologized their complaints to deflect blame from law enforcement.
This critique raises an uncomfortable question at the heart of the concept: when a hostage says the police scared them more than the captor did, is that a psychological disorder or a reasonable assessment of who was actually putting them at risk?
How the Concept Spread Beyond Hostage Situations
The term might have stayed a footnote in Swedish criminal history if not for the Patty Hearst case. On February 4, 1974, less than six months after the Stockholm siege, three armed members of a radical group called the Symbionese Liberation Army burst into 19-year-old Hearst’s apartment in Berkeley, California, and kidnapped her. Two months later, a bank security camera captured Hearst holding an assault rifle during a robbery alongside her captors.
Her 1976 trial became a national spectacle. Had she been brainwashed? Was she acting out of fear for her life? Or had she genuinely joined the group’s cause? The defense leaned heavily on the idea that Hearst had developed the same kind of bond described in Stockholm. The jury wasn’t persuaded and convicted her, but the trial cemented Stockholm syndrome in the public vocabulary. It became the go-to explanation for any case where victims appeared loyal to those who harmed them, from kidnapping survivors to people in abusive relationships.
Not a Recognized Diagnosis
Despite how widely the term is used, Stockholm syndrome is not an official psychiatric diagnosis. The American Psychiatric Association does not include it in the DSM, which is the standard reference manual for mental health conditions. Because of this, there are no diagnostic criteria, no established treatment protocol, and no consensus among clinicians about whether it represents a distinct psychological condition or simply describes a range of trauma responses that already have other names.
Some psychologists prefer the term “trauma bonding” to describe similar dynamics, particularly in abusive relationships. The distinction matters: trauma bonding describes a pattern where someone feels compelled to return to an abusive relationship even while recognizing the danger, while Stockholm syndrome traditionally implies the victim empathizes with or defends the abuser. In practice, the two concepts overlap significantly.
Modern clinicians who encounter these patterns in patients are more likely to frame them through established diagnoses like post-traumatic stress disorder or complex trauma responses. The bonding behavior itself is generally understood as a survival mechanism. When someone is completely dependent on another person for food, safety, and moment-to-moment survival, forming an emotional attachment to that person can be an unconscious strategy to stay alive. Small acts of kindness from a captor take on outsized significance when that person also holds the power to kill you.
Why the Name Persists
The term endures partly because it fills a gap in everyday language. People need a shorthand for the unsettling phenomenon of victims defending their abusers, and “Stockholm syndrome” is vivid and instantly understood. It appears in news coverage, crime dramas, and casual conversation far more often than any clinical alternative.
But its staying power also reflects the original controversy. The name was created by a police consultant to explain away hostages who criticized the police. It became famous through a trial where it failed to convince a jury. And it has never been formally recognized by the psychiatric establishment. Stockholm syndrome is less a medical concept than a cultural one: a compelling story attached to a real but poorly defined phenomenon, named after a city where the most interesting part of the story may have been the part that got buried.