Morro Bay is a touristy little spot on coastal Highway 101 winding its way north along the Pacific beaches.

It has two landmarks, an enormous dome-shaped rock and massive chimneys from a power plant, long since decommissioned and just blighting the landscape.

The rock is actually a volcanic plug, what’s left of an extinct volcano when its ash and lava are eroded away, magma that stuck in the throat of the volcano once it cooled. It is protected as a State Preserve, but linked by a causeway to the mainland, so you can walk around there and ponder people’s indelible desire to leave their marks on the landscape…

The small town is filled with tourist shops, restaurants and motels, but also has a working harbor, with the fishermen happily throwing tidbits to the seagulls and sea lions too lazy to even move, sleeping it off on the rocks circling the moored yachts.

It is also a short, 30 minute drive away from a major tourist attraction: Hearst Castle. If willing to pay a mere $35 per person, you can visit the estate of the former media tycoon William Randolph Hearst in a 127 acres garden, a minute part of the 250.000 acres he acquired in the region. My severe allergy against tycoons prohibited me from exploring, but it served as a reminder of the fate of Patty Hearst, the magnate’s granddaughter, which brings us to today’s topic.

As a 20-year old college student, Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbioses Liberation Army and went on to commit several crimes with them, for which she was later sentenced and eventually pardoned with the understanding that she might have been brainwashed to commit to the goals of the radical organization.

The term bandied around was “Stockholm Syndrome,” coined originally by a psychiatrist after an earlier kidnapping scenario in a botched Swedish bank robbery, where the hostages were claimed to develop psychological bonds with their captors and agree with their agenda and demands. It was even insinuated that they formed romantic attachments.

You can imagine my surprise, or dismay, when I learned from a recent Radiolab Podcast (verified when I did some more research) that the whole concept is based on someone’s imagination, not facts. The psychiatric assessment was originally made without ever talking to the hostages, something that did not stop the concept’s adoption into our arsenal of cultural assumptions, (here, for example is the Encyclopedia Brittanica defining it,) including the training of some 7000 police and FBI agents on how to deal with hostage situations regarding this aspect. Of note is, of course, that it never made its way into The American Psychiatric Association‘s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). “It’s never met the strict review requirements to be included; in fact, it seems that no one ever submitted it for inclusion in the first place. That means there are no identified diagnostic criteria at all for the alleged condition.” (Ref.)

If you are like me, we assumed it was something that is indeed happening when captors exert power over people fearing for their safety, turning them into acolytes. Yet, when you look at the actual unfolding of the original bank robbery, it was clear that it was the bank and the police that so completely mishandled and botched the operations, that it was no surprise the captives felt safer with the captors than with the institutional responses, without forming attachments whatsoever. There is now a whole literature that has debunked the case.

For the most part, it is women victims who are pathologized, with a focus on their “crazy” reactions, rather than the perpetrators’ arsenal of threats. No surprise, then, that the concept is often extended to domestic violence cases as well.

Canadian psychologist Allan Wade, who interviewed the original victim deemed pathological in her appeasement of the kidnapper in Stockholm, phrased it this way:

Stockholm Syndrom is “one of a whole network of concepts that … shift focus away from the powerful role of … institutional responses… Such concepts also tend to protect offenders because, instead of looking at strategies used by perpetrators to suppress victims, resistance theories such as Stockholm Syndrome and others (there’s a long list of them: identification with the aggressor, infantilization, traumatic bonding, learned helplessness, internalization, false consciousness, it goes on and on) don’t evolve focus on how victimized people have responded to and resisted violence. Rather, they assume that they did not...It’s part of a family of notions that stem from hyper-individual, problematic notions in psychology and psychiatry, rather than careful analysis of circumstances on the ground.

These practices of implanting pathologies in the minds, brains and bodies of oppressed people, they’re inherent to what we might call colonialism, patriarchy, different forms of racism, different forms of violence and oppression,” he says. “So this is not sort of an accidental or uncommon problematic way of thinking; rather, it is endemic.” (Ref.)

Before wandering off into Morro Bay’s spectacular sunsets, let me point out how easy it is to create and/or fall for these kinds of urban myths, when the concepts align with other things you believe to be true. It is also the case that we need to distinguish between misinformation (inaccurate info), disinformation (deliberately gaslighting) and conspiracy theories, which encompass the idea that malicious actors are engaging in a secret plot that explains an important event (Jewish space lasers or the government covering up an enormous death toll from vaccines, etc.) And last but not least, we have to be aware that there are those of us who are perfectly willing to admit they fell for a myth, and henceforth let the facts rule, compared to others who will cling to prior held beliefs even if it involves ignoring the facts and instead coming up with substitute justifications.

Music today from Swedish composer Hugo Alfven, his Symphony #5.

For informative readings today on the topic of how to undermine conspiracy theorizing:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-can-you-fight-conspiracy-theories

On the topic of how misogyny increasingly affects our lives (and, alas, that of future generations,) including the pathologizing of women in violent situations:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/america-misogyny-gender-politics-trump/680753

Highly recommended. Gilbert is one smart writer.

And if you are more in the mood for black comedy/ entertainment, here is a film about one of the criminals involved in the Swedish hostage situation.

https://www.netflix.com/watch/81215890?trackId=255824129