“Get down on the floor! The party is starting!”. Shouting in English, Jan-Erik Olsson entered the August 23, 1973 in a Stockholm bank, high on drugs, agitated and holding an automatic pistol.

Thus began a hostage drama that was to last six days and give its name to the term “Stockholm Syndrome” – a universally used concept that describes the emotional bond that hostages develop with their captors.

Olson, known by the diminutive ‘Jan’, took four bank workers – three women and one man – hostage.

Police and journalists soon swarmed the square outside the Kreditbanken branch, and snipers shot into neighboring buildings with their gun barrels pointed at the bank.

Olson used two hostages as human shields and threatened to kill them.

“Later, I often thought about the absurd situation in which we found ourselves. Terrified and between two death threats — the police on one side and the robber on the other,” Christine Enmark, a former hostage and 23 years old at the time, recalled in her book I Became Stockholm Syndrome.

“I was afraid for my life”

Olsson made several demands, asking for three million Swedish kroner (almost $700,00 at the time) and for one of the most notorious bank robbers in the country, who was in prison, Clark Olsson, to be brought to the bank.

In order to keep calm the Swedish government agreed.

The entire country was watching the unfolding drama, one of the biggest news events to be broadcast live on Swedish television.

“When he arrived, Clark Olofsson took control of the situation, he was the one who negotiated with the police,” 73-year-old Bertil Eriksson, a photojournalist who covered the crisis, recalled in an interview with AFP.

“He was very charismatic. He was a good speaker,” she says.

Olsson calmed down as soon as Olofsson arrived, and Christine Enmark soon saw in the latter’s face her savior.

“He promised that he would make sure that nothing would happen to me and I decided to believe him. I was 23 years old and I was afraid for my life”, she writes in her book.

During her captivity she spoke by phone several times with the authorities shocking the world when she came out of the bank defending her captors.

“I’m not the least bit afraid of Clark and the other guy, I’m afraid of the police. Do you understand that? I trust them completely,” he told then Prime Minister Olof Palme in one of those phone calls.

“Believe it or not, we’re having a great time here,” he said, explaining that they were “telling stories” and “playing checkers.”

“You know what I’m afraid of? That the police will do something to us, break into the bank or something like that.”

The standoff ended on the sixth day when police fired tear gas into the bank and freed the hostages, forcing Olsson and Olofsson to surrender.

“It’s not a psychiatric diagnosis”

Psychiatrist Nils Begerot was a member of the negotiating team. His job was to analyze the behavior of robbers and hostages and he eventually coined the term “The Stockholm Syndrome”.

At the time the female hostages were believed to have acted as if they had been bewitched, something like brainwashing.

But psychiatrists have since abandoned this view.

Stockholm Syndrome “is not a psychiatric diagnosis,” says Christopher Rahm, a psychiatrist at the Karolinska Institutet and author of the scientific article “Stockholm Syndrome: Psychiatric Diagnosis or Urban Myth?”.

Rather, the term is used to describe a “defense mechanism that helps the victim” manage a traumatic situation, as he explains to AFP.

Cecilia Asse, a professor of gender studies at Stockholm University, said that Enmark and the other women’s statements during the hostage-taking were interpreted by the authorities “with a very sexualized dimension, as if they had been bewitched” and had lost all ability to think. logically on their own.

This view was also fueled by rumors of a relationship between Enmark and Olofsson.

Although the two became romantically involved years later, there is no evidence to suggest that there was anything between them inside the bank.

“There was no love or physical attraction on my part. It was my chance for survival and it protected me from Jan,” wrote Enmark, who was the inspiration for her character “Kiki” in the Netflix series “Clark”.

Ashe argues that Stockholm Syndrome is “a made-up concept” used to explain how hostages behave when authorities and governments fail to protect them.

The Stockholm hostages, in fact, “acted too rationally,” she told AFP.

“They called journalists, fought (with the police and with politicians) to let the robbers accompany them out of the bank. We were a real threat to the hostages,” police inspector Eric Ronegard admitted in a book published years later.

“With so many police officers surrounding the bank, there was a risk that one of the hostages would take a bullet.”

In a sign of their frustration with police handling, the hostages later refused to testify against their captors.

Most people can identify with this concept on a psychological level, Rahm explains, noting that emotional ties to someone who poses a threat are common in abusive relationships as well.

Understanding a victim’s psychological reaction also helps to free them from remorse, he concludes.