The Shadow of Freudian Core Issues on Wuthering Heights: A Reenactment of Emily Brontë’s Early Mother Loss

Abstract

The study attempts to indicate how the manifest content of a text is in essence the projection of the obsessional thoughts of the neurotic author. The research approach adopted in this study is what is referred to as psychobiography or the Freudian psychoanalytic criticism. Freud's ideas have been employed due to the increasing shift to him in the recent decades, particularly in the discipline of psychobiography. The findings of this research underline that nearly all the characters of the novel are stricken by their mother's death, and they not only undergo the processes of dejection, melancholia, and hysteria, but also suffer from certain core issues—fear of intimacy, fear of abandonment, fear of betrayal, low self-esteem, insecure or unstable sense of self. The main conclusion to be drawn from this article is that Emily Brontë was a neurotic person whose unconscious obsession of psychoanalytic love of mother is projected in Wuthering Heights.