"In the early 20th-century Age of Empire, when European colonies stretched across the world, psychoanalysis was the novel technique of the moment. In an attempt to better understand their colonial subjects in those years, officials in the British empire undertook a curious and little-known research project: to collect dreams from the people of South Asia, Africa and the Pacific."
> Whether in Freudian or Jungian perspective, Seligman saw that the colonial subjects’ dreams pointed in the direction of one unexpected conclusion. As he put it in 1932 : ‘The savage mind and the mind of Western civilised man are essentially alike.’
That this was a novel conclusion shocks me, less than a century later!
Linebarger makes similar points to what the British discovered here in his Psychological Warfare book I've cited in another thread; reading between the lines he makes a strong, if implicit case, for desegregating the US Army in the 1940s edition (something they would eventually do ~Korea — but still in advance of much of civilian society) and for taking decolonisation seriously in a later, domino-theory-era, edition.
"In the early 20th-century Age of Empire, when European colonies stretched across the world, psychoanalysis was the novel technique of the moment. In an attempt to better understand their colonial subjects in those years, officials in the British empire undertook a curious and little-known research project: to collect dreams from the people of South Asia, Africa and the Pacific."