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There are two major themes woven together in this important paper. The first questions aspects of Jung's evidence that the collective unconscious and its archetypal contents are essentially non-racial. This, of course, was essential if Jung was to assert the universality of this layer of the psyche. The other theme is an examination of Jung's negative view of African Americans and, more importantly perhaps, the implications of such a legacy for modern day Jungian analysts.
The central focus for Brewster's historical considerations is Jung's return visit to the US in October 1912 which he undertook essentially for the purpose of examining the dreams of African Americans in order to confirm his theory that the collective unconscious is not racially determined.
Jung was given access to fifteen African American male patients at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington DC in order to analyse their dreams. The image provided by one dreamer was that of a man being crucified on a wheel which Jung linked to the Greek myth of Ixion. The ‘fact’ of the dreamer being a ‘Negro of not much intelligence’ who could not have known of the myth of Ixion was taken as crucial evidence of the non-racial, and therefore collective nature of the archetypal image.
Despite his own assertions that the analysis of dreams requires a careful consideration of the personal aspects of the dreamer and their associations to the dream images, despite his stating that the objective psyche can only be known by detailed examination of the context within which the image emerges, it seems that here Jung was shockingly remiss in his research methodology. Neither the name nor any personal details regarding the background of this particular dreamer were recorded. Only the motif of the burning wheel is mentioned, asserting as he did in his 1935 Tavistock lecture that the rest of the dream was irrelevant. The association with Ixion was Jung's and not the dreamer's; indeed it seems there is no evidence at all of any en