  Prior to 1940, some consideration of each of these causes of oppression and related strategies of resistance is evident in Du Bois’s writings. Still, Dusk of Dawn is remarkable for the prominence it gives to the role of unconscious and irrational psychological forces in accounting for the existence and perpetuation of racial oppression. Du Bois attributes this new emphasis to the “new psychology” of the “Freudian era.”  His “study of psychology under William James” had prepared him for the Freudian turn, he remarks, and its “meaning and implications…had begun slowly to penetrate his thought” (1940, 148). 