When discussing the psychology of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and more specifically, the psychoanalysis of the central character Heathcliff, critics are quick to use the aid of the theories brought forth by Sigmund Freud. Freud states that people’s personalities consist of three parts: the id, ego, and superego. It is only when these parts of a person’s psyche are in balance, that that individual can be mentally healthy. If some traumatic event causes a shift in power between these elements, it will lead to personality contortion. This is what occurs to Heathcliff in Wuthering Height; Catherine chooses Linton’s status over Heathcliff’s love, which in turn causes Heathcliff to lose grips with his sanity. From that point on Heathcliff’s only focus is achieving his revenge.
The id is a person’s most primitive desires. These are his wants. The only focus that the id has is fulfilling its wants and achieving immediate satisfaction. The id is not affected by the everyday world. It operates on the pleasure principle. Heathcliff’s id wants Catherine, and when he couldn’t have her it caused him great pain. In a normal rational person, this is when the superego would come into effect. The superego would control the id’s irrational impulses and influence the ego to make the decision that is the most morally and socially correct. Then the ego would attempt to mediate between the id and superego, makes sense of things, and then makes a decision.
However, due to that fact that Heathcliff was an orphan on the streets when he was taken in by Mr.Earnshaw to Wuthering Heights, this is not how Heathcliff’s mind functions. This is because as an orphan all Heathcliff cared about was survival. According to psychologist Abraham Maslow, humans ...
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...eathcliff after completing his revenge. Although his ego is able to ignore the super ego and its punishment while he is pursuing his revenge, this is only because during this time the id power is indisputable. In the battle over control of the ego, as long as there is revenge to be had, the super ego doesn’t stand a chance. However, as soon as the id’s desire for revenge is met, it stops controlling the ego. It achieved its goals. This is when the super ego takes over. Now that it has power over the ego, the conscience system of the super ego begins punishing the ego severely. It doesn’t allow Heathcliff to achieve any feeling of satisfaction from his revenge. Instead the super ego’s punishment is so absolute that Heathcliff begins to feel tortured and empty, and eventually he becomes a hollow shell of the man he used to be. His punishment concludes with his death.
(Thombs &Osborn, 122). Each of these plays a different role, but they interact with each other. The id is the original foundation of one’s personality and deals with the instinctual drive. The instinctual drive is the inner source. The id is created at birth and it is also the basic life form which the ego and superego then starts to differ from one another. Since the id has instinctual drives, the individual’s body then starts to crave things. This is where addiction comes to play. The ego comes from the id to satisfy the individual’s needs and the superego is like the conscience. It separates wrong from right. Patients tend to think that these addictions helps them cope with their problems.
Heathcliff cried vehemently, "I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!" Emily Brontë distorts many common elements in Wuthering Heights to enhance the quality of her book. One of the distortions is Heathcliff's undying love for Catherine Earnshaw. Also, Brontë perverts the vindictive hatred that fills and runs Heathcliff's life after he loses Catherine. Finally, she prolongs death, making it even more distressing and insufferable.
The initial downward spiral of Heathcliff’s life was predominantly caused by harsh influences in the environment in which he was raised. Heathcliff, an adopted child, grew up in Wuthering Heights, a desolate and dystopian estate when compared to the beauty of the neighboring Thrushcross Grange. In childhood, Heathcliff displayed evidence of a sympathetic personality through his emotional attachment to Catherine and kind attitude towards Nelly. At the time of Mr. Earnshaw’s death, Nelly describes a scene where, “Miss Cathy had been sick, and that made her still; she
In Emily Bronte's novel 'Wuthering Heights,' the principal characters Cathy and Heathcliff are presented as needing this division within themselves to recognise their need for each other. This endurance of physical, mental and spiritual division whilst alive, allows them only tragically to experience when in death, complete entity within themselves.
Heathcliff was adopted into the Earnshaw home when he was a young boy. The Earnshaw family consisted of Mr and Mrs. Earnshaw, Hindley, and Catherine. Since he was first brought to the home by Mr. Earnshaw, he has caused trouble. Heathcliff’s actions throughout the book alone could be considered evil or immoral, but readers feel sympathetic because of his inability to share his thoughts or feelings in a considerate manner or because some characters treat him worse than he treats them.
Emily Brontë, in her novel, Wuthering Heights, suggests that children, in their very nature, exhibit traits from their parental influences. However, these traits are not always represented at the same time and can come out in different situations. For instance, as Cathy Linton grows up, her personality is a mixture of her calmer father, Edgar, and her more fiery mother, Catherine. She shows both these personalities, but she limits each to the correct time and circumstance. Also, the same goes for Linton Heathcliff, who has become a mixture of both his mother, Isabella, and his father, Heathcliff. Lastly, this is shown in Hareton Earnshaw, who, because he has little to no relationship with his biological parents, has turned into a man more like Heathcliff, his surrogate father, instead of Hindley, his genetic father. In this way, parental influence can shape a child into becoming more like them.
In the book Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Hindley and Heathcliff share resentment for one another. Since Heatmhcliff became a part of his family at a young age, Hindley has been strongly jealous of him. With Heathcliff gaining Mr. Earnshaw’s (Hindley’s father) appreciation over Hindley, this caused tension to be built up by the bitterness and hatred. Heathcliff, having his adopted father’s appreciation, had power over Hindley and would constantly extort him or even threaten him. But, the strained relations between Heathcliff and Hindley causes them to be very violent natured in the future, being physically and verbally abusive. As they grow older and their resentment for one other starts to increase, Heathcliff and Hindley come to be violent and abusive not just in regards to each other but to the other main characters in addition.
From the beginning of the novel and most likely from the beginning of Heathcliff's life, he has suffered pain and rejection. When Mr. Earnshaw brings him to Wuthering Heights, he is viewed as a thing rather than a child. Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out the doors, while Nelly put it on the landing of the stairs hoping that it would be gone the next day. Without having done anything to deserve rejection, Heathcliff is made to feel like an outsider. Following the death of Mr. Earnshaw, Heathcliff suffers cruel mistreatment at the hands of Hindley. In these tender years, he is deprived of love, friendship, and education, while the treatment from jealous Hindley is barbaric and disrupts his mental balance. He is separated from the family, reduced to the status of a servant, undergoes regular beatings and forcibly separated from his soul mate, Catherine. The personality that Heathcliff develops in his adulthood has been formed in response to these hardships of his childhood.
In Sigmund Freud’s “An Outline of Psychoanalysis”, we encounter the id, ego and the superego. Freud explains that our id controls everything “that is inherited, that is present at birth, that is laid down in the constitution” (Freud 14). Our natural instincts are controlled by the id. The fight for survival is driven by the id in our psyche. The ego “preforms by taking control over the demands of the instincts” (Freud 15) it seeks a safe
... images the story of Catherin and Heathcliff’s struggle to find one another and themselves at Wuthering Heights was able to be understood by the reader. The central theme of identity search was clear because of the words chosen by Emily, the passages from the text above and the central line “I am Heathcliff” (82). The social status and sew of the characters is what ultimately lead to the choices they made which in turn determined their final identities, the ones that they were destined to get but did not want. Catherine and Heathcliff both made their decision on who they wanted to be and how they wanted to be defined. Their identities are what they died with and although they were buried beside eachother that’s not how they lived their lives. Identity is a balance between outer and inner perception and once one realizes what they want it’s hard to balance the two.
The id and superego are on two opposite ends of the spectrum, and they are polar opposite to another, but they each live inside humans. The id is the primal instincts of one’s self it has; it is the
Although, Mr. Earnshaw tried to make Heathcliff an equal part of the family, Heathcliff never truly fits in. Heathcliff is from a completely different social class than the rest of his “family”. This led to the hatred that Hindley felt towards Heathcliff. Hindley robs Heathcliff of his education, forces him to work as a servant at Wuthering Heights and frequently beats him. Throughout this all, Heathcliff never complains.
The Id “knows no judgments of value: no good and evil, no morality (Freud, The Dissection of the Psychical Personality, 2004, p. 84).” This means that the Id is the part of the personality that is unorganized in the processes and only contains the instincts for biological needs for the person to live. Since the Id has no sense of morals, does not know good or evil, its main goal is to get the person whatever it needs by any means possible to thrive. The way to remember that the Id has no judgments of value is to think of it as a child. A child wines and cries until they receives food, drink or human touch. The child is so unruly that it needs somebody to control it and this would be the Ego. The Ego’s functions on the reality principle that means it keeps the Id under control by organization of the processes in the personality. The Ego is the mediator between the Id and superego which will be discussed later. Since the ego is considered a mediator it could be remembered as the brains of the operation. It keeps the Id under control by educating it and showing that if a need must be met there is a specific way to obtain it. Next is the Superego, Freud considered “the origin on conscience,” meaning that the Superego specific function is to act as the person’s conscience between good and evil (Freud, The Dissection of the Psychical Personality, 2004, p. 74). The Super ego balances out the Id
All these factors are involved in the shaping of the mind. The ID, ego, and superego are always in a never-ending conflict in the unconscious mind. The resultant effect is the difference in behavior and reaction, this forming and showing the differences in personality. The Id is an essential element in our lives because as newborn children, it allows them to get their basic needs. The id wants what feels good at a particular instance with no regard to the reality of a situation. The Id is a pleasure principle seeking gratification with its instincts being aggression, food, and sexual
The ego struggle to keep the id happy. The ego meets with obstacles in the world. It occasionally with objects that actually assists it in attaining it goals. The ego keeps a record of the obstacles and aides. It also keeps a record of punishments and rewards administered out by the two must influential objects in the world of a child, its mom and dad. This record of things to avoid and strategies to take becomes the superego. As stated earlier the primary function of the id is to satisfy its immediate instincts, drive and urges it superego that links the mind to society and reality. As Freud (1960) states \"superego is however, not simply a residue of the earliest choices of the id; it also represents an energetic reaction formation against those choices\" (p.24).