Curing traitors? Disguised treason laws, social danger, and the "humanism" of psychiatric confinement in Communist Poland
Curing traitors? Disguised treason laws, social danger, and the "humanism" of psychiatric confinement in Communist Poland

Summary/Abstract: This article elaborates on two striking silences concerning the Communist prosecution of traitors in Poland between the 1950s and the 1960s: an absence of the concept of treason in the records of the secret police, prison administration, and the prosecution, and the historiographical silence regarding the political uses of psychiatry against dissenters and alleged traitors. Drawing on case studies of individuals prosecuted under Article 29 of the Minor Penal Code for the humiliation or ridicule of the Polish state or for fascist crimes, it shows how diagnoses of schizophrenia or paranoia enabled the compulsory confinement of citizens expressing anti-Communist and anti- Soviet attitudes in closed psychiatric institutions. The article thereby proposes an alternative genealogy of Communist punitive psychiatry and a comparative perspective that highlights potential continuities between two periods of ideological consolidation: the NEP and early Stalinist era, and the Polish postwar period. Therefore, it examines the critical nexus between the concept of social danger, the identification of traitors and social enemies, and the role of psychiatric confinement within this system of ideological policing. Finally, it argues that the flexible and disguised categories of treason under Polish Communism, together with the pathologization of dissent and ideological disloyalty, point to an underlying biopolitical and disciplinary project that enabled the terror of the prosecution of actual and potential deviant behavior, the shaping of the socialist personality, and the construction of socialism as a lived social reality.

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