By
Liam Butchart, MD, MA
Clinical Instructor
Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University
and
Julia Tsvyakh, MD
Psychiatry•Stony Brook, NY
Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
Abstract:
Two of the central conceits of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights are the significance of illness and death and the relationship of the individual to society. The death of Catherine Earnshaw is narratively central to the text, having a fundamental impact on Heathcliff’s development as a character. It also poses a particularly vexing question: why does she die, and how does her death lead to Heathcliff’s doom? We propose that their deaths are at the same time social, medical, and psychological in nature, and we further suggest that a Freudian approach provides a framework for explicating both the Catherine-Heathcliff dynamic and their demises: though through different mechanisms, both have deep psychological conflicts that lead to overpowering death instincts. Viewed through this lens, the characters’ relationships to the larger Victorian society are examined and tied to the contemporary biopsychosocial approach to illness.
To cite as: Butchart, l. & Tsvyakh, J., 2025, “Totemism and Thanatology on the Moors:
A Freudian Psychoanalytic Approach to Wuthering Heights,” PsyArt 29.2, pp. 88-114.