A Battle for the Post-War Mind: Social Imaginaries of Brainwashing, Resilience and the Welfare Citizen in Sweden and Denmark, c. 1950–1970

Abstract

This article examines Scandinavian debates about brainwashing and human automatons in the 1950s and 1960s, situating them within the intersecting contexts of the Cold War, post-war welfare-state formation and rapid technological change. It argues that, whereas US understandings of brainwashing were largely framed in terms of the liberal subject's loss of freedom under totalitarianism, Swedish and Danish debates reworked the concept through the idioms of collective welfare, civic responsibility and social-democratic citizenship. Brainwashing thus became a vehicle for debating not only ideological subversion but also consumer manipulation, media influence and the alienating effects of modern technological society. The article traces the concept's transatlantic circulation and Scandinavian reconfiguration through newspapers, translations of scientific and psychological literature, governmental initiatives in psychological defence and a range of cultural productions. These sources show how brainwashing functioned as a boundary object linking concerns about propaganda, education, media infrastructures and social (dis)order. More broadly, the article contends that brainwashing operated as a social imaginary through which wider tensions within post-war modernity were negotiated. The figure of the brainwashed automaton served as the negative counterpart of the rational, resilient and democratically engaged welfare-state citizen. Yet this contrast also reveals an important paradox: the ideal citizen was to be protected from manipulation, while simultaneously being cultivated through education, psychological resilience and social planning. In this way, brainwashing discourse illuminates the co-production of technology, citizenship and governance in post-war Europe.