Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A psychological syndrome in which a person being held captive begins to identify with and grow sympathetic to his or her captor, simultaneously becoming unsympathetic towards the police or other authorities.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
psychological condition in which ahostage emotionallybonds to his or her captor.
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[After Stockholm, where a hostage in a 1973 bank robbery became romantically attached to one of her captors.]
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Named after the Norrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg, Stockholm, Sweden in which the bank robbers held bank employees hostage from August 23 to August 28, 1973. Coined by criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot.
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word Stockholm syndrome.
Examples
Sorry, no example sentences found.
Words5999 commented on the word Stockholm syndrome
In Beauty and the Beast, as Belle begins to fall in love with the Beast, she is experiencing the symptoms of Stockholm syndrome.
March 9, 2012