Wikipedia, drawing on the work of Nils Bejerot, defines Stockholm syndrome as follows:
Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response sometimes seen in abducted hostages, in which the hostage shows signs of loyalty to the hostage-taker, regardless of the danger or risk in which they have been placed. The syndrome is named after the Norrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg, Stockholm, Sweden, in which the bank robbers held bank employees hostage from August 23 to August 28 in 1973. In this case, the victims became emotionally attached to their victimizers, and even defended their captors after they were freed from their six-day ordeal. The term “Stockholm Syndrome” was coined by the criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who assisted the police during the robbery, and referred to the syndrome in a news broadcast.
In other words, Stockholm Syndrome is a response to a traumatic event wherein the subject forms a loyalty bond to the other that inflicts violence on it. This process also describes the constitution of political subjectivity through trauma—it is the logic of the social bond. The International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis defines trauma as:
an event of such violence and suddenness that it occasions an inflow of excitation sufficiently strong to defeat normally successful defense mechanisms; as a general rule trauma stuns the subject and, sooner or later, brings about a disorganization of the psychic economy.
As politics is always as much about reproduction as production, political subjectivity is perpetually reproduced by new trauma and by events which trigger the return of old trauma. As Freud put it in one of his models of the traumatic process:
traumatic effect came into play only…on the occasion of a second scene that served to reactualize the repressed memory of the earlier one.
These events must continue to occur, or political subjects will begin to break down. This recurrence is accomplished externally and internally. Consider a subject who is ticketed for parking illegally and later reminds him or herself not to park in that spot again: there is a chain of events which begins outside the subject and continues inside of it.
Well burrowed, old mole! 