Health care,esoteric practices,and socialist governmentality in Poland

Abstract

Esoteric practices have often been linked to health issues. This connection was also very visible in late socialist Poland. The first part of the article puts forward a number of arguments supporting the hypothesis that we can speak of socialist governmentality in relation to health care and health practices. The article then examines two major actors in the Polish esoteric community in the 1970s–90s who addressed health issues vigorously. The article focuses on the actress, journalist, and founder of the Life Academy, Lucyna Winnicka. It also presents Lech Emfazy Stefański, a theatre director, writer, co-founder of the Warsaw Association of Radiesthetists, and the creator of the Mind Improvement Course, to provide a contextual framework of health-related practices of esoteric groups. What these activities had in common are the following aspects: (a) they were grass-roots initiatives that emerged as a response to the inefficiency of the health care system, (b) they cooperated with the academic community and state institutions, and (c) the state authorities seem to have accepted the spread of medical pluralism in the late 1970s and 1980s. The Catholic Church was sympathetic to the topic of faith healing and related issues at the time, as well. Taking its cue from the interplay between esoteric practices and health promoting practices in communist Poland, the article demonstrates that not only Western societies were marked by the culture of therapy during the 1970s and 1980s, which prompts us to re-examine the questions of governance and subjectivity in authoritarian contexts.