Linda Howard: In Light of Freud's Theory.
Linda Howard, a nineteen year old high school senior, has overcome many obstacles resulting from her biracial ethnicity, and has graduated as the valedictorian of her senior class. After reading and discussing her case study, my group and I came to the conclusion that we are better able to understand Linda, in the sociological perspective, by incorporating Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory. This emphasizes biological determinants of behavior, ego, the conscious part of the psyche which controls behavior and thought processes, and the super ego, the unconscious division of the mind that is molded by the internalization of moral standards of authority such as; parents, society and censors, which restrains the ego. Linda stated that she identifies with both races, her white ethnicity inherited by her American European mother, and her black race and culture, from her father's African American descent, and considers herself of no race other than that of the "human race." Because she spends a lot of time thinking about different ethnicities, cultures, and the fact that she is highly offended when she is considered as anything other than biracial, it is safe to say that she is still very confused.
Freud stated that, to survive one most begin to come to term with the objective world, via secondary processes, which involves learning from real experiences, reality principle, the ability to predict over the environment, and difficulty controlling ID urges (hierarchically based instincts), factors which all incorporate the ego.* Howard has to deal with the objective world on a daily basis, because like she stated:.
no matter how light you are to the rest of your family, you're the darkest person .
there and they say you're black. Then you go out with a bunch of Black people and .
you're the lightest there and they say," Yeah, my best friend's White.
