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SIX DAYS IN AUGUST by David King

SIX DAYS IN AUGUST

The Story of Stockholm Syndrome

by David King

Pub Date: Aug. 4th, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-393-63508-9
Publisher: Norton

A historian painstakingly reconstructs the crime that gave rise to the pop-psychological term Stockholm syndrome.

In August 1973, a furloughed Swedish convict armed with a submachine gun burst into a Stockholm bank and took four hostages, who, during their ordeal, seemed to grow attached to the gunman and a prison mate brought in at his request. The crime inspired the catchphrase Stockholm syndrome, which King defines as “the psychological tendency of a hostage to bond with, identify with, or sympathize with his or her captor.” It is often applied to high-profile kidnapping victims such as Patty Hearst and Elizabeth Smart. The “syndrome,” however, has been little studied and isn’t an officially recognized psychiatric condition; rather, it is “more a media phenomenon than a proper psychiatric diagnosis.” As such, King reconstructs the six-day standoff by drawing largely on sources other than academic studies, ranging from FBI materials to interviews with hostages and with gunman Jan-Erik “Janne” Olsson and his prison friend Clark Olofsson. In a suspenseful, chronological narrative, the author shows how missteps by the police, the media, and Prime Minister Olof Palme, combined with small acts of kindness by the hostage-takers, drew the group together. Early on, for example, the police barricaded the entrance to the bank vault in which the captors and captives hid, leaving the group with nothing to eat or drink, which made the hostage-takers look like heroes when authorities yielded to their demands for food. The most startling sign of a bond arose after the standoff ended when hostage Kristin Enmark asked captor Olofsson to father her child and was “devastated” when the resulting pregnancy was ectopic. King keeps a tight focus on ties that arise in hostage crises, but readers may suspect that some of his findings apply to the “terror bonding” that results from other crimes, such as domestic violence or child abuse.

A true-crime page-turner about one of the more notorious bank heists of the past half century.

(8 page b/w photos)