Englewood Cliffs, NJ

Sunday, August 30, 2009

ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, NJ: Jaycee Lee Dugard spent the last 18 years of her life beneath dirty tarps with two children fathered by her abductor/rapist. Now that she's physically free from this hellish existence, the pundits are falling all over themselves trying to explain this as an example of Stockholm Syndrome. This "syndrome" resulted in captives in a bank robbery alleged becoming aligned with their captors to the point that one captive wanted to marry one of them. Of course this was prior to the infamous Patty Hearst abduction in 1974 and her later rescue by two years. The race was on to explain how this woman from a wealthy and very famous family could have participated in armed robberies.

We have seen this before in the Nazi concentration camps of the 1940s and about which Dr. Bruno Bettelheim wrote so eloquently. Prisoners began to attempt to dress like their guards and engaged in actions worthy of guards. Of course, they were severely punished when found to do either. It was called "Identification with the Oppressor" and was seen as something that could explain why women in brutal relationships remain and keep coming back to their brutalizer.

What about survival? Didn't Jaycee want to survive and hadn't she, perhaps, tried to escape only to be recaptured and punished in some way? This would seem the natural thing to do and is probably what happened. When she realized that, no matter what she did, she couldn't get away, she began to see herself as helpless. Did she either "identify with" her captor? Probably not, too. She knew that to survive and to avoid further pain, either emotion or physical, she had to comply.

To ascribe all sorts of analytic explanations without ever having meet, much less worked with this woman for a great deal of time, is foolish, unethical and places the mental health profession in danger of being marginalized. With whom are these pundits identifying? Are they trying to please their audience, make a reputation, get more media time? Probably all of the aforementioned.

Foolish? Yes. Unworthy of someone with an advanced, hopefully, degree? Yes. Dangerous? Yes.

Moral of the story: beware of individuals with advanced degrees offering quick-and-dirty simple explanations for complex problems.

http://www.drfarrell.net

Patricia A. Farrell, Ph.D.

Licensed Psychologist

Patricia A. Farrell, Ph.D., LLC

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

201-646-0478