1. A Psychoanalytic Viewpoint

Wuthering Heights has always been recognised as an enigmatic, mysterious and therefore in a sense inaccessible work, peculiarly unresponsive to reductive interpretations of its content or its structure. For example, although it appears an attractive candidate for psychoanalytic interpretation, yet the revelatory nature of its symbolic drama means that its total movement cannot be encompassed by a scheme which views the work as an attempt — successful or otherwise — to cure a disturbed personality and achieve a balanced normality. If the characters are regarded as case-histories, or even as internal objects or part objects, the reality of the poetic quality is lost; consequently the essential meaning of the whole process is altered, since this is knowable only within the poetic form of its being, not as any allegorical abstraction. And any substantial study which is neither an interpretation within specific limits, nor an excursion ‘round’ the novel in terms of source, literary genre, contemporary context, is liable to be assumed to be a ‘paraphrase’. But it is possible to make a constructive use of a psychoanalytic viewpoint which concentrates on the essentially aesthetic nature of the mind's organisation in the process of coming to knowledge — the process of creative thought, not discursive ‘thinking about’. The concept of ‘catastrophic change’ is fundamental to the understanding of learning from experience, a process applicable to both author and reader, in which the structure of the mind itself becomes as it were poetic, responsive to a principle of beauty.

It is this, rather than any extravagant notion of virtue, which lies behind an ideal such as Milton's of ‘becoming a true Poem’.1 And recent developments in psychoanalytic practice, have been concerned less with establishing the validity of interpretation, and more with the analyst's problem of observing and knowing the nature and significance of the patient's impact on himself. It is a switch of orientat