Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Stockholm Syndrome and Mark Twain

I know we have all heard about situations in which a person held as a hostage may-in some cases-bond with their captors.  Wikipedia.org defines the Stockholm Syndrome as follows;  "in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors".  I was surprised when recently I was reading Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer-the 1922 edition.  On page 273 Tom and Huck talk about being pirates and taking hostages.  They would kill the men but keep the women.  Twain then notes that "Well, the women get to loving you, and after they've been in the cave a week or two weeks they stop crying and after that you couldn't get them to leave.  If you drove them out they'd turn right around and come back. It's so in all the books".

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