How reading the novel Wuthering Heights may help us to better understand the human condition and the psychotherapy process  

by SinÉAD BURKE  

Art contains great power and it may also help people to better understand their human condition. The French painter Georges Braque asserted that “Art is a wound turned into light.” (quoted in de Ambrogi, 2020: 22). Art deals with human suffering and psychological pain and it is a medium which can help people to heal from trauma. Contemporary research in the field of psychology indicates that reading fiction improves a person’s ability to empathise with and understand the thoughts and feelings of others. Mar et al. (2006, 2009, 2010 cited in Tamir et al., 2016) illustrate how readers of fiction score higher than non-readers on measures of empathy and theory of mind (ToM) which refers to the ability to think about other people’s thoughts and feelings. In this article, I will explore how the reading of a novel may be useful and relevant to understanding the psychotherapy process. Specifically, I will examine how the novel Wuthering Heights may be relevant for both psychotherapists and clients, as a means of understanding their inner and outer worlds, providing an insight on what it means to be human and why this is significant in the psychotherapy process.  

On a cold dark night on the Yorkshire moors, Catherine Earnshaw - lost for years - struggles to find her way home. She sees her house, Wuthering Heights, and attempts to enter through her childhood bedroom window. The current occupant of the room, a stranger to Catherine, resists her attempts to force her way through the window. After Catherine leaves, the event is reported to the head of the house, Heathcliff, who reveals “Cathy” to have been dead for twenty years. Upon hearing about Cathy’s appearance, Heathcliff breaks down and begs for Cathy’s return.  

Cathy and Heathcliff are the main characters in Emily Brontë’s 19th century Gothic romance novel, Wuthering Heights. It is a violent and powerful work of art, a complex story of love, obsession and revenge, taking place over two generations. The second half of the novel explores how the next generation (young Cathy Linton and Hareton Earnshaw) transform the legacy of inter-generational trauma which occurs. Wuthering Heights deals with themes of childhood, nature, suffering, love and spiritual transcendence, which are all part of the experience of what it is to be human. The novel takes the reader on a journey by exploring the conflict between characters’ inner and outer worlds. Gold (1985: 68) highlights that the landscape depicted in Wuthering Heights is not only external but internal as well. This is useful for psychotherapists and clients alike, as clients present at therapy when there is a conflict between their inner and outer worlds. The task for the psychotherapist is to really meet the client, just as they are, to hold space for the client and to help them make the unconscious conscious, and to move towards a journey of healing and integration. The themes in the novel are akin to formative human experiences which are investigated in the psychotherapy process.  

Psychotherapy is defined as “The systematic use of a relationship between therapist and client (as opposed to pharmacological or social methods) to produce changes in cognition, feelings and behaviour” (Clarkson, 2003: 3). The psychotherapeutic (psyche: soul, therapy: healing) relationship which is formed between therapist and client is a soul healing relationship. It is the relationship between two souls that is the healing and transformative element that occurs in therapy. Nolan (2012) describes how people are essentially relational beings with the need to relate to another, and how infancy and childhood development demonstrates the way intersubjectivity forms the bedrock of people’s lives. Human beings need to be in relationships; relating and being related to matters. For a client, being met by a therapist as they are, and being able to deeply relate with the therapist, is what makes the relationship the foundation of psychotherapy. It is the relating and being related to which matters more than any other approach. Thus understanding what it is to be human is of crucial importance to the psychotherapy process.  

Childhood development and nature  

In the context of psychotherapy, early childhood development, typically the first three years of a person’s life, is the period that sets the foundation for all future learning, behaviour, relationships and health (Wallin, 2007: 11). Understanding of one’s own experience of early childhood development is important so that individuals can understand their own wants and needs, in order to allow them to become their true selves and if necessary to build the structures that were missing in their childhood. In therapy, whatever dynamic is playing out between the client and the therapist typically links back to the client’s childhood. In the novel, Cathy starts off her life innocent, wild and free, but is quickly shaped by hurt, loss and societal pressures. The circumstances she faces and the decisions she makes cut her off from her true nature. As a result, she feels limited and constrained in life. She retroflects, turning her unhappiness inwards (Perls et al., 1992). Heathcliff takes his unhappiness out on others.  

The novel illustrates the struggles and conflicts in life that all humans are faced with. It highlights the importance of being true to oneself despite the circumstances you face. What makes the characters relatable is the conflict they endure, the struggle between their heart’s desire and what society expects of them. Society places expectations upon all of us, such as the roles of mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, sisters and brothers. Caught between two worlds, the characters deny the parts of themselves they find unacceptable and make the fatal choice of betraying their souls. Both Cathy and Heathcliff’s stories are about the struggle to reintegrate all the parts of themselves, which makes this work of art hold great power. It is relevant to the process of psychotherapy as clients move towards integrating all the split-off parts of themselves. The novel portrays the human struggle between the inner and outer worlds, which so often brings clients to therapy in the first place. The protagonists show the reader what it means to be human and how this is a journey of self-acceptance, the struggle to reintegrate all of the parts of oneself and the importance of coming home to ourselves so that we can live authentically when in relationship with others.  

Childhood development and nature are central themes in the novel. As a child, Cathy is a free spirit, she is a nature-loving, tender-hearted and beautiful girl but she can also be spiteful, cruel, arrogant, violent, manipulative and selfish. Cathy is happiest when playing and roaming free outdoors; she is as wild as the environment she inhabits on the windy moors. The narrator tells us:  

Her spirits were always at high-water mark, her tongue always going—singing, laughing, and plaguing everybody who would not do the same. A wild, wicked slip she was—but she had the bonniest eye, the sweetest smile, and lightest foot in the parish.  

(Brontë, 1847/1995: 42)  

Cathy’s connection to nature represents the freedom, innocence and happiness of being a child. However, Cathy’s childhood is not untroubled: in a pivotal part of the story, her father goes away on a trip, and when he returns, instead of bringing presents requested by the children, he reveals from under his cloak that he has brought back an adopted boy. The boy is given the name Heathcliff, after a son of his who died in infancy. The narrator tells us that: [1771, Heathcliff aged about seven]“He seemed a sullen, patient child; hardened, perhaps, to ill-treatment” (Brontë, 1847/1995:38).  

Heathcliff quickly becomes the father’s favourite. Hindley, who used to be the favourite, becomes Heathcliff’s rival. Hindley is cruel and he bullies Heathcliff mercilessly. Cathy is cruel at first, she grins and spits at Heathcliff. Both children reject their new sibling. However, over time, Cathy and Heathcliff develop a close bond, they are similar, they are wild, free-spirited, unruly and love playing together on the moors. They are best friends, and, in the absence of other children, they are each other’s only friends. Less than two years after Heathcliff joins the family, their mother, Mrs Earnshaw dies. Hindley is sent away to college by his father. Catherine and Heathcliff’s bond grows even stronger; all they have is each other and they love wandering around the moors together. This is until Cathy suffers a traumatic injury and the neighbouring well-to-do family, the Lintons, take her in. Here she spends time with other children, Edgar and Isabella Linton and is introduced to high society at Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff feels abandoned by Cathy and when she returns, she is different and he struggles to accept her.  

Cathy states: “I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free…and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed?” (Brontë, 1847/1995: 124). She yearns for a truer and less constrained self; she longs to return to her wild ways, to being free and playing on the moors before she was carefully schooled in femininity at Thrushcross Grange.  

It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles,  

but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn  

(Brontë, 1847/1995: 91).  

The thorn represents Cathy; society and Thrushcross Grange are represented by the honeysuckle. Cathy is a match for Heathcliff’s courage, recklessness and defiance. Cathy and Heathcliff’s childhoods are traumatic and they both experience violence but they share great companionship with one another and find freedom together playing on the moors. Their childhoods end when Cathy is taken in by the Lintons at Thrushcross Grange. Although Cathy and Heathcliff suffer in childhood, their greatest suffering occurs when they are separated. This separation is reoccurring and the novel provides great insights into important concepts in the psychotherapy process such as attachment, trauma and early childhood development. Carroll (2008; 254) states that the reader of the novel ‘becomes absorbed in the figurations of Cathy and Heathcliff due to the seductions of emotional intensity that derives much of its force from deep disturbances in sexual and social development.’  

Suffering  

Suffering is a key theme in the novel. Edgar courts Cathy and in a pivotal moment, Heathcliff hears Cathy telling the housekeeper that it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff. What he doesn’t hear is her declaration that she is betraying her own soul:  

It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff. I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am.  

(Brontë, 1847/1995: 82) 

Cathy is selfish (she wants both Edgar and Heathcliff). She cares too much about what society thinks and marries for status rather than love. Cathy is trying to survive in a patriarchal society: though her soul longs to be with Heathcliff on the moors, she betrays her soul by marrying Edgar.  

Corey (1992: 92) describes how in psychoanalytic theory, the personality is comprised of three parts: (i) the id, the original system of personality, is pleasure-seeking and wants to satisfy its needs; it focuses on its wants and the unconscious is out of awareness; (ii) the ego makes contact with the external world and reality; it attempts to regulate instincts versus environment; (iii) the superego operates as the ruling branch of the personality and is made up of morals and right versus wrong; it is an internalisation of the accepted norms of both parents and society. Gold (1985: 68) drawing on Freudian theory of the development of the human personality, theorises that the symbiosis of Heathcliff, Cathy and Linton could represent an interaction within the human personality of the id, the ego and the superego. 

 

Integrating the shadow  

The process of psychotherapy is about the journey of learning how to integrate all the parts of oneself. Applying Jung’s ideas of animus, anima, ego, shadow, persona and archetype (1997: 91) to the reading of this novel can be useful for understanding the psychotherapy process of making the unconscious conscious, accepting all the parts of ourselves and moving towards healing and transformation.  

Jung described the shadow as “the ‘negative’ side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious” (1997: 87). The shadow represents the aspects of our personality that we choose to reject and repress. A person’s shadow is a part of them; as humans, we make desperate attempts to deny the shadow self but this can result in a deep split within us. Both the journey of being human and the process of psychotherapy are about experiencing ourselves as whole and coming home to ourselves. It is impossible to experience this when we are terrified of accepting our shadow. As humans, we rely on a whole range of ego-defences (projection, splitting, rationalisation and acting out in anger) which are all attempts to deny the shadow.  

For Cathy, Heathcliff represents her shadow. To Cathy, Heathcliff is dark, violent, unaccepted by society, vengeful, angry, irresponsible, free and rebellious. To Heathcliff, Cathy is beauty, love, status, acceptance and belonging. Wuthering Heights offers huge insights into the power of the shadow and the destruction and loss which occurs when people are unable to own their shadow. Just like in life, beneath the characters’ everyday personas there are all kinds of unconscious motivations that end up determining their fate. In the process of psychotherapy, resistance to owning one’s shadow will usually be bound up with projections and the cause of the emotion appears to lie in the other person.  

Jung theorised that the appearance of the shadow brought about another “inner figure” which emerges (1997: 186). The anima - the woman within - refers to the personification of all feminine tendencies in a man’s psyche. The animus - the man within - describes the male personification of the unconscious in a woman’s psyche. The anima is influenced by negative and positive experiences of a man’s mother and similarly the animus is influenced by negative and positive experiences of a woman’s father. Von Franz (in Jung 1997: 199) describes Heathcliff as “sinister and partly a negative, demonic animus figure which is probably a manifestation of Emily Brontë’s own animus”. The novel is helpful in recognising the parts of ourselves which must be understood for self-knowledge and awareness whilst working through the psychotherapy process as both therapist and client.  

Love and transcendence  

The central relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff is now often considered one of the great tragic love stories; their love can be seen as a transcendent love that survives even in death. Most humans experience love, either being loved or loving others or struggling with loving themselves. Love is not the purpose of life but love has an unbreakable grip and life would be empty without love. Cathy loves Heathcliff but marries Edgar as she wants to be a respected member of society. She believes that Heathcliff will understand but this is a huge mistake; Heathcliff feels rejected. Cathy and Heathcliff have both hurt each other but they are completely attached and cannot bear to be separated. Cathy loves Heathcliff intensely; she states:  

My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees – my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath – a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff – he’s always in my mind – not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself – but, as my own being – so, don’t talk of our separation again – it is impracticable and – 

 (Brontë, 1847/1995: 82)  

Cathy’s love for Heathcliff is beautifully described: it is passionate, solid and everlasting, like the eternal rocks beneath in the earth. Cathy is entirely in love with Heathcliff, so much so, that she declares that she is Heathcliff. Cathy goes on to say about Heathcliff: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” (Brontë, 1847/1995: 83). This is a beautifully romantic and poetic line that appeals to the universal human desire for love, a feeling of completeness that we are all searching for and the longing to find a soulmate or to come home to ourselves and love ourselves.  

Heathcliff loves Cathy and declares his love for her is greater than Edgar’s love for her: “If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day” (Brontë, 1847/1995: 147). Heathcliff cannot stand to be without Cathy; he is lost without her and refers to her not only as his life but as his soul. He states:  

Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!  

(Brontë, 1847/1995: 167)  

For much of the novel, the love between Cathy and Heathcliff is driven by passion. The star-crossed lovers are consumed by this love. Their efforts to be together are thwarted in life, however, their love for each other transcends life itself. After Cathy’s death during childbirth, Heathcliff spends the remainder of his years longing to be reunited with her. During life, Heathcliff had resisted his own love for Cathy and focused on his quest for vengeance. In his final days, he longs for death as he wishes to be reunited with Cathy. In submitting to death, he finally submits to love. The locals in the area claim to see Heathcliff and Cathy’s ghosts wandering the moors together.  

The narrator passes their graves on the moors and states:  

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.  

(Brontë, 1847/1995: 334)  

The wind is breathing through the grass: nature is representing the happiness in Cathy and Heathcliff’s childhoods, and their passionate love is still alive. Cathy and Heathcliff are finally reunited, they have found peace and there is hope that they still exist on earth in some spiritual form; they are free from societal constraints to wander the moors together.  

In conclusion, Wuthering Heights is a story about embracing the darker parts of ourselves. It is a cautionary tale that encourages us to follow our hearts, to be true to ourselves, and it shows the damage caused to relationships if we betray our souls, do not become aware of our shadows and do not embark on a journey of reintegrating all the split-off parts of ourselves. The reading of a novel, as a means for both psychotherapists and clients for understanding their inner and outer worlds, provides fantastic insights on what it means to be human and the human condition, which is incredibly important, useful and relevant for understanding the psychotherapy process.  

Like all humans, Cathy longs for a perfect other, a soulmate, but in life Cathy doesn’t get the kind of love she desires from Heathcliff or Edgar. Nevertheless, her passionate spirit transcends death and endures. The message here is that the love we desire isn’t going to come from anyone else; the longing and the search for love is about coming home to ourselves. Kate Bush’s song “Wuthering Heights” (cited in Mathews, 2019) has immortalised Cathy in the art form of music. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Cathy’s story is told from the perspective of other characters. In Kate Bush’s version of Wuthering Heights, Cathy’s story is no longer told by other people, Cathy herself is the narrator, she speaks from within and it is Cathy’s point of view. When she sings, “You had a temper, like my jealousy / too hot too greedy”, ‘my’ refers to Cathy and ‘you’ to Heathcliff. This choice by Kate Bush gives Cathy her own voice (Mathews, 2019).  

Cathy’s story in the novel shows the dangers of projecting our shadow, desires and visions onto others. Her struggle within herself is extremely relatable as it encapsulates the human experiences of childhood, connection to nature, suffering, love and the hope for spiritual transcendence at the end of life. Her story is one of reintegration which makes this a very powerful work of art with significant parallels to the psychotherapy process. Cathy returns home, to Wuthering Heights, clawing at her childhood bedroom window. “I’m come home: I’d lost my way on the moor!” (Brontë, 1847/1995: 25). If we can all stay true to our heart’s desires, accept all the parts of ourselves and come home to ourselves, we can live authentically, connect deeply when in relationship with others, and live a fulfilled life.  

Sinead Burke is a third-year student, studying experiential, integrative and humanistic psychotherapy.  

References  

Brontë, E. (1847/1995). Wuthering Heights. Penguin Books.  

Carroll, J (2008). The cuckoo’s history: Human nature in Wuthering Heights. Philosophy and Literature 32(2) Oct 2008: 241-257.  

Clarkson, P. (2003). The therapeutic relationship. 2nded. Wiley.  

Corey, G. (1992). Theory of counselling and psychotherapy. 4th edition. Brooks/Cole Pub Co.  

De Ambrogi, M (2020). Art is a wound turned into light. The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2020: 22, ISSN 2352-4642.https://doi.org/10.1016/S2352-4642(19)30394-3  

Gold, L. (1985). Catherine Earnshaw: Mother and daughter. The English Journal, 74(3), 68–73. https:// doi.org/10.2307/817114  

Jung, C. (1997). Man and his symbols. Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group.  

Mathews, B. (2019). On Kate Bush’s radical interpretation of Wuthering Heights or, how to teach English with a music video. Literary Hub. Retrieved from https://lithub.com/on-kate-bushs-radical-interpretation-of-wuthering-heights  

 Nolan, P. (2012) Therapist and client: A relational approach to psychotherapy. Wiley-Blackwell.  

Perls, F., Hefferline R. & Goodman P. (1992). Gestalt therapy. Profile Books Ltd.  

Tamir, D. I., Bricker, A. B., Dodell-Feder, D., & Mitchell, J. P. (2016). Reading fiction and reading minds: the role of simulation in the default network. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 11(2), 215–224. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsv114  

Wallin, J. D. (2007). Attachment in psychotherapy. The Guilford Press. 

IAHIP 2022 - INSIDE OUT 96 - Spring 2022