Claremont never specifies which of Jean's "innermost forbidden needs and desires" Mastermind is manipulating nor with which he is presenting her. What Claremont does make clear, however, is that Mastermind, with the help of Emma Frost, is able to not only control what Jean
sees but also what she
thinks,
feels, and
believes. As Scott notes in the panel below, "This 'ancestor' – Lady Jean Grey, wife of Sir Jason Wyngarde –
knows nothing of the X-Men. Her allegiance is to the Hellfire Club. If they ask her to kill us… I've a nasty feeling she'll do it without a second thought." The villain of the piece making the heroin completely forget who she is, who her friends and family are, and even where and
when she is from seems like a monumental aspect of this story to overlook.
Jean "knows nothing" of people she has known for years, some for decades, and that she literally grew up with, yet is somehow acting totally on her "innermost forbidden needs and desires?" If the implication is that she has always harbored racist feelings, why stop there? Based on the setup, one can suppose that she must have always had a need and desire to fall in love and be intimate with Mastermind, forget not just her close friends and romantic partner, but her entire life, including her family, identity, and the era into which she was born. One can also assume that she always had a need and desire to live in the antebellum 18th century as a black cape-, bodice-, and panty-wearing woman.
This begs the question, though: If Mastermind was simply giving Jean her "innermost forbidden needs and desires" and not influencing and even controlling those needs and desires, why would he require the use of such illusions and severe mind control? After all, when Jean finally breaks from his hold on her, he ponders, "She must have broken my
control, but how?"
It is clear that what Mastermind was tapping into and giving Jean was a manufactured and contaminated sense of love, romance, danger, and power based on her "innermost forbidden needs and desires" for
those things, i.e., love, romance, danger, and power,
not the illusions he cloaked them in nor the mind control he used to force those illusions, amongst other things (shudder at the thought)
inside of her. I hardly doubt that Claremont intended to suggest that, in addition to "need[ing]" and "desir[ing]" to be a racist and own a slave, Jean also "need[ed]" and "desire[ed]" to forget her entire identity and loved ones, live in the antebellum period, frolic around in a bodice and panties, and enslave and harm all of her friends. After all, Claremont wrote "needs and desires," not "true thoughts and feelings."
Of course, people who like to pretend to be aghast at this scene to claim that Jean is a racist character do not seem to mind the author who penned this tale. In fact, they even lavish praise on him and sometimes proudly promote his name like a brand in their signatures. I find this puzzling, especially if the intent is to call out racism and not really just to insult a character they seem to hate, along with trying to sully and shame said character's fans. (After all, these characters are fictional and their thoughts, feelings, and intentions are dictated by the writers...) The fact that they so easily "sweep" the psychic and strongly implied physical rape "under the rug" as if it were just an insignificant little detail certainly does not belie their intentions.
The real unspoken crime and tragedy of the Dark Phoenix Saga and how some choose to view it for their own nefarious reasons is not the racism that these people maliciously and unfoundedly claim Jean "need[ed] and desire[d]," but the willingness to overlook the abuse a character was subjected to as if one should call it by any other name. A woman's psyche was invaded only to be contorted, contaminated, and, ultimately, controlled. If that weren't bad enough, the woman was also sexualized and placed in sexually compromising positions, to say the least. The redemptive irony here is that the one character that intuited and truly got what had transpired just so happens to be the character that should have been the most incensed and offended; that is, of course, if this claim of Jean being a racist contained a modicum of logic, critical thinking, or veracity.