have the effect of bringing her up short where her id is
concerned. Accordingly, although initially she is romantically
attracted to Justin, partly because of his authoritative ease
with social activism, her marriage to him eventually betrays the
emotional peace of her id. The disruption of this peace comes
about as a result of new information, received from what are for
Emily to become new and competing norms of civilization,
eventually require a response from her ego, in the form of
competing anxieties and guilt. The Freudian explanation of the
process that Emily undergoes on a personal level is made in part
by his explanation of the position of the individual in
What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit
the aggressiveness which opposes it, to make it harmless,
to get rid of it, perhaps? . . . What happens in [the
individual] to render his desire for aggression innocuous?
Something very remarkable, which we should never have
guessed and which is nevertheless quite obvious. His
aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in
point of fact, sent back to where it came from that is,
it is directed toward his own ego. There it is taken
over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over
against the rest of the ego as super ego . . . The
tension between the harsh super ego and the ego that
is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt;
it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civiliza
tion, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual's
dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and
disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to
Freud expresses the dynamics of these kinds of
contradictions in a way that would have Emily's (traditional) ego
as an aggressor/repressor against the civilized (i.e., superego)
society of which repressed black people are members. The demands
of...