When he turned to analyse Lhuzekhu’s dream, for instance, Seligman began with Lhuzekhu’s own words: ‘The excellence and strength of my carved post means I shall have fine sons and daughters.’ Picking up on the ‘phallic’ symbolism of this phrase, Seligman thought it revealed that Lhuzekhu’s sense of self was rooted in ‘strength and reproduction’. So he instructed his dream-collecting agents – an assortment of colonial officials and anthropologists stationed across the world – to question their informants about the reactions and associations that arose as they described their dreams. Like any good Freudian, Seligman knew that the meaning of dreams could be elicited only through the act of interpretation simply recording the twists and turns of the narrative was not enough. It was an unconventional move, not only because Freud’s theories remained controversial in scientific circles, but also because most observers in the West still clung to the stereotype of alien and inscrutable minds in supposedly ‘primitive’ societies. Dream research would show whether Freudianism could travel across cultural boundaries and return with richer, more textured portraits of the mind. Seligman came to believe that these methods brought mere technical precision without the depth or complexity of inner life. He also felt constrained by older techniques in psychology, such as measurements of reaction time to visual stimuli, which were long seen as the only kind of mental experience researchers could reliably capture. Seligman, a Sigmund Freud enthusiast, wanted to see what sort of information the powerful new tool of psychoanalysis could generate when confronted with the diverse cultures under British rule. So what did he hope to accomplish by amassing dreams such as Lhuzekhu’s?īuilding a database of colonial dreams was a quixotic, even utopian, project. Seligman was, in short, an imperialist and a classifier par excellence. That meant defining human groups on the basis of physiognomy and locating them in evolutionary hierarchies. Seligman made his career as a physical anthropologist at the height of racialist science. Seligman was a longtime adviser to colonial governments, which funded his research and helped to train colonial officials at the LSE.
Lhuzekhu’s dream was among hundreds collected from across the British empire – from the Indian subcontinent, Nigeria, Uganda, Australia, the Solomon Islands and elsewhere – on the instructions of an anthropologist at the London School of Economics (LSE) named Charles Gabriel Seligman. I looked at all my posts and especially at the carved one in front of the door, and said: ‘If it had not been for this post, my house would have fallen and I should have had a lot of trouble.’ I held the post fearing my house would be blown over.
I was frightened it might hurt me and threw a stone at it … Then I found myself in my house with my family … We all sat round the fire. An elephant with no one on its back came up from the bazaar. Lhuzekhu’s boss, a British district officer, recorded this dream in 1924: I went alone down to the school. Take, for example, the dream of Lhuzekhu, a man from the Naga Hills of Northeastern India who worked as an interpreter for the colonial administration. 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. In the early 20th-century Age of Empire, when European colonies stretched across the world, psychoanalysis was the novel technique of the moment. This is not just a matter of tedious bureaucratic record-keeping: especially when confronted with unfamiliar problems, states often turn to cutting-edge technologies and forms of expertise to make sense of the populations under their authority.
Censuses, property surveys and tax records are familiar and tangible expressions of the state’s need to maintain power by accumulating knowledge. Every state needs to know about the people it rules.
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