The superego is the opposite of id which serves as the sensor or conscience of a person.

However, people with an overactive superego who survive such an ordeal can develop a deep sense of depression, and they persist in asking the question: "Why did I survive when so many others did not?

Using case studies and interviews they describe how people in such societies respond to economic change and acute marginalization by behaving outside that culture's expectations, covering consumerism and its countercultures, the intellectual roots of post-war criminal law theory, exclusion and resistance, current thinking on crime and culture, the reorientation of the Western superego, and the pseudo-pacification of crime.