In 1999 the FBI analyzed over 1,200 barricade and hostage situations to see how often a captive's bond with a kidnapper interfered with police rescue operations. The answer was zero. This episode deconstructs how Stockholm syndrome, a condition absent from the DSM-5, hijacked the global conversation about psychology. It returns to the botched 1973 bank robbery in Stockholm, where a convict on furlough took four employees hostage, the government delivered his criminal friend to join him, and police sent an unrelated sixteen-year-old into the vault, locked the door, cut the lights, and threatened to pump in gas, prompting the robber to put nooses around the hostages' necks.

The conversation explains the fawn response as a rational survival mechanism, then examines how criminologist Nils Bejerot declared the hostages brainwashed on national te ...