“The bourgeois … necessarily regards all behaviour that bursts ‘spontaneously’ forth from the individual ignorant of its causality, as above all free. Therefore the instincts are conceived as freely striving for unconscious goals, and psychology becomes the adventures of the free instincts in their struggles against the restraints of the environment (in Freud, of society) which impede and cripple their freedom. Out of this struggle cognitive and emotional consciousness is born.Now the only objection to this bourgeois psychology is that it inverts the picture. The instincts are not free springs of connation towards a goal. They are, so far as they can be abstractly separated, unconscious necessities, as Kant realised. They are unfree.”

—  Christopher Caudwell

Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949), Chapter IV: Consciousness: A Study in Bourgeois Psychology

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Christopher Caudwell10
British Marxist literary critic, journalist and writer 1907–1937

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