It's tempting to want to diagnose Heathcliff—his character is a kind of perfect storm of psychopathologies. I think, however, that we miss the point of the book in trying to assign Heathcliff (or Cathy, or Hareton—any of them, really!) a specific diagnosis. It's not how they are crazy that matters, as much as why.
Nevertheless, there has been plenty written about this, starting with . Or, you could look in the critical literature:...
It's tempting to want to diagnose Heathcliff—his character is a kind of perfect storm of psychopathologies. I think, however, that we miss the point of the book in trying to assign Heathcliff (or Cathy, or Hareton—any of them, really!) a specific diagnosis. It's not how they are crazy that matters, as much as why.
Nevertheless, there has been plenty written about this, starting with . Or, you could look in the critical literature: Heathcliff has been associated with the idea of phobias, or a morbid fear of or revulsion to open spaces, insects, or Lintons; the book itself has been read as an example of Freud's fort-da game, which forms the basis for much of his theory of the unconscious.
One thing that comes to mind, which is a bit different than the illnesses you mention, is a form of Dissociative Identity Disorder. If we have to understand Heathcliff as a patient, then how else can we explain his bizarre fixation on Catherine, or his famous speech after her death, "I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!" Heathcliff's connection to Catherine seems to transcend what we understand as a "normal" love relationship. An argument could be made that his fixation is more than a simple compulsion, and that Catherine has become an essential component of his personality, both angel and demon.
However, I think Virginia Woolf got it right when she said about Emily Bronte and this book,
The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel—a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which is not merely “I love” or “I hate”, but “we, the whole human race” and “you, the eternal powers . . .” the sentence remains unfinished. It is not strange that it should be so; rather it is astonishing that she can make us feel what she had it in her to say at all. (Common Reader, first series)
Heathcliff may be crazy, but it is the craziness that comes with existence, a craziness we all share.
See also:
Trotter, David. “The Invention of Agoraphobia”. Victorian Literature and Culture 32.2 (2004): 463–474. Web.
Olszewski, Brian. “Ludic Economies of Wuthering Heights”. Journal of Narrative Theory 40.1 (2010): 1–28. Web.
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