Research Catalog

Details

Additional authors

1. Rawlings, Edna I.
2. Rigsby, Roberta K.

Description

1. xxiii, 321 pages; 25 cm.

Summary

1. In 1973, three women and one man were held hostage in one of the largest banks in Stockholm by two ex-convicts. These two men threatened their lives, but also showed them kindness. Over the course of the long ordeal, the hostages came to identify with their captors, developing an emotional bond with them. They began to perceive the police, their prospective liberators, as their enemies, and their captors as their friends and a source of security. This seemingly bizarre reaction to captivity, in which the hostages and captors mutually bond to one another, has been documented in other cases as well, and has become widely known as Stockholm Syndrome. Dee Graham and her coauthors take this syndrome as their starting point to develop a new way of looking at male-female relationships. Loving to Survive considers men's violence against women as crucial to understanding women's current psychology. Men's violence creates ever present, and therefore often unrecognized, terror in women. This terror is often experienced as a fear - for any woman - of rape by any man or as a fear of making a man - any man - angry. They propose that women's current psychology is actually a psychology of women under conditions of captivity - that is, under conditions of terror caused by male violence against women. Therefore, women's responses to men, and to male violence, resemble hostages' responses to captors. Loving to Survive proposes that, like hostages who work to placate their captors lest they kill them, women work to please men, and from this springs women's femininity. Femininity describes a set of behaviors that please men because they communicate a woman's acceptance of her subordinate status. Thus, feminine behaviors are, in essence, survival strategies. Like hostages who bond to their captors, women bond to men in an effort to survive. This is a book that will forever change the way we look at male-female relationships and women's lives.

Series statement

1. Feminist crosscurrents

Uniform title

1. Feminist crosscurrents

Subject

1. Women > Crimes against > United States
2. Abusive men > United States
3. Women > United States > Psychology
4. Abusive men
5. Women > Crimes against
6. Women > Psychology
7. Gewalt
8. Psychologie
9. Geschlechterverhältnis
10. Psychodynamik
11. Verbrechensopfer
12. Verarbeitung
13. Feministische Psychotherapie
14. Geschlechterrolle
15. Vergewaltigung
16. Frau
17. Mann
18. United States

Contents

1. 1. Love Thine Enemy: Hostages and Classic Stockholm Syndrome -- 2. Graham's Stockholm Syndrome Theory: A Universal Theory of Chronic Interpersonal Abuse? -- 3. "Here's My Weapon, Here's My Gun; One's for Pleasure, One's for Fun": Conditions Conducive to Women's Development of Societal Stockholm Syndrome -- 4. En-Gendered Terror: The Psychodynamics of Stockholm Syndrome Applied to Women as a Group in Our Relations with Men as a Group -- 5. The Beauties and the Beasts: Women's Femininity, Love of Men, and Heterosexuality -- 6. Moving from Surviving to Thriving: Breaking Out of Societal Stockholm Syndrome -- Appendix. Potential Aspects of Stockholm Syndrome.

Bibliography (note)

1. Includes bibliographical references (p. [283]-306) and index.