Hamas Style Stockholm Syndrome
Wikicommons Screenshot
Captor Bonding and the Lifshitz Interview
By Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, Ph.D.
War Blog #12
Yesterday’s War Blog #11 Hamas Owns Wellesley touched on the identification with the aggressor. Today we look at a variant of it, The Stockholm Syndrome. This subject has come to the fore because of the interview given by one of the elderly captives who was released yesterday Yocheved Lifshitz. She should not be blamed; she continues to be extremely traumatized and it will take time. Her interview was understandable given what she managed to live through. Both articles cited below attempt to explain why the victim said what she said but from different points of view. The first mentions trauma but not the trauma of how victims become bonded to their captors and the second notes how Hamas resorts to what Nazi propaganda did Cf.
Can we trust the testimony of a traumatized terror victim? Analysis
and
Hamas employs Nazi Propaganda Tacts Senior Israeli Official [remarks]
Quoting from the above article “Yoseph Haddad, a well-known Israeli Arab activist who has dedicated himself to explaining Israel’s positions to the world, posted his frustration on X, saying it “drives me crazy how we fall into the trap of Hamas’s psychological warfare.
“The ‘dedicated and humane treatment’ of ISIS-Hamas is already echoing around the world. They have already forgotten about the horrors we watched yesterday,” Haddad tweeted.”
The Psychological War
The best article that I have read so far which touches on the importance of the Stockholm Syndrome is the thoughtful interview of clinical social worker Eiyar Segall. https://www.jns.org/beware-of-media-interviews-with-returning-gaza-hostages/
What do we know about the Stockholm Syndrome?
The Stockholm Syndrome is the psychological tendency of a hostage to bond with, identify with, or sympathize with a captor. Please note once again the theme of bonding – the hidden subject is the maternal bond.
The term Stockholm Syndrome came from a 1973 robbery attempt in Stockholm, Sweden, during which bank employees being held hostage developed sympathetic feelings toward their captors. One year later the term entered common parlance in America on account of the hostage taking of Patty Hearst cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patty_Hearst
Hearst became so bonded to her captors of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), that in order to survive she herself became a member of the SLA. I personally knew, though not well, Angela DeAngelis who also was in the SLA. Back then during her sorority days at Indiana University she was known as “Angel.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Atwood
The definition that I use in The Jihadi Dictionary for The Stockholm Syndrome is a captive’s loyal response to the captor. It can be a mental or emotional response on the part of the captive, who can come to see law enforcement or rescuers as the enemy because they endanger the captor. Yocheved Lifshitz initially demonstrated this.
How Stockholm Syndrome expresses itself in jihad is its terror bonding, violently targeting and holding captive non-Muslim and Muslim victims who are not actively engaged in jihad. In addition, within the group psychosis of the terrorist organization, there is another kind of terror bonding that occurs simultaneously and that is the activation of powerful sadomasochistic impulses.
Jihadis feed off one another through contagion-based, primitive, copy-cat behavior. The unconscious register of the jihadi occurs simultaneously by means of a splitting between overt and covert, which when read together and experienced carries the terrorizing punch. Eiyar Segall in her interview mentioned splitting.
To give one example from the trauma that Lifshitz experienced we can speculate that the physical beatings, the manner in which the 85 year old was initially captured, the murderous rampage she was caught up in, death surrounding her etc. and the fact that her husband remains a hostage, is actually unconsciously expressing the anal stage of arrested development of Hamas and their terrors while moving to destroy their victims such as Lifshitz.
Lest we forget she is also not just a hostage but Lifshitz unconsciously represents the jihadi’s mother. This plugs all of us into the communicative circuit of our own maternal terrors. The jihadis’ projection which Eiyar Segall also mentioned, causes paralysis, denial, and distortions. This induces the identification with the aggressor, a variant of the Stockholm Syndrome wherein the jihadi aggressor is embraced and his actions minimized through irrational justifications. We hear a lot of this from the “Islamic version of Masse und Macht [Crowds and power] such as in the Hamas days of rage and the scream for moral equivalency, all the antisemitism today etc.
Understanding the jihadis’ projections, unconscious motivations, and double talk will help us be on the offense and proactive rather than scurrying around defensively. Being reactive will only encourage further terrorism. We must become as accomplished at thwarting attacks and eradicating the root causes of terrorism as the jihadis are at cultivating and disseminating their loathsome brand of fear and hatred. Hence, it should not be surprising to read such an initial interview. Instead to be prudent, skeptical and patient is wise as Eiyar Segall notes.
Terror bonding is an extension that follows the trajectory of infant attachments to adults. Bonding through violence is the essence of the Stockholm Syndrome replayed under Islam’s jihad.
The Role of Social Media
Social media and its graphic imagery for jihadi violence creates yet another kind of bonding, a variant of the Stockholm Syndrome forming an identification with the aggressor. Its perversion functions as a lure for those who are mentally unstable and who vicariously enjoy violence.
The bonding to a perversion indicates a primitive mental state, which attempts to contain violence and aggression but fails. As in all perverse acts, the object is misused. The perversion links back to the toxically perceived body of the mother. A comprehensive study on hostage taking, “Held Hostage,” was done by the Center for CounterTerrorism, West Point, but there was no discussion of terror bonding nor maternal attachment. The inability to go to the root of the problem is an indicator of how very terrifying all of this is. Hence denial.
The jihadi strategy of coercion, power, and control aim to abuse the victim in order to consolidate the jihadis’ fragile identity through this powerful coercive identification. By producing a violent “bond” between victim and perpetrator they gain an identity. Yet the jihadis always claim to be the victim because they have a borderline personality disorder. This causes confusion facilitating an identification with the aggressor. Creating this defensive identification in their victims oddly gives the jihadis the sense of identity that they lack.
To conclude Eiyar Segall is wise in advising us not to take the survivor hostage interview at face value and to wait at least three days for the body chemistry to change to help the victim reach a new self-state though still obviously traumatized. It takes time. The point that I want to stress here once again is that Hamas’s rage which exceeds murder is not of this time and not of this place rather it has to do with their unmet needs from early childhood. This is the severe cruelty inflicted on all of us. Nothing they do is justifiable. Yet we pay the price.
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