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The star-crossed life of Vincent van Gogh is one of the familiar icons of the meaning of the artistic vocation in its modern, romanticized guise. The story of his tragic life is familiar enough and needs no retelling—it has been the stuff of popular books and even movies for years. The impact of his towering genius, set in the matrix of such a troubled and difficult life that led finally to suicide, has puzzled and intrigued psychoanalysts and presented a continuing challenge that at once whets the analytic appetite and resists satisfaction or closure.
The fascination is made all the more profound by the fact that Vincent1 left a rich legacy of testimony about himself. There is, not only the immense outpouring of artistic works, sketches, and paintings numbering in the thousands (Hulsker, 1980), but the massive collection of letters addressed primarily to his brother Theo but also to other family members and fellow artists. They provide a unique register of his inner life and the torments of self-doubt and depressive agony that plagued him at every step along his lonely and troubled odyssey.
In this sense, Vincent provides a prototypical case for the study of artistic pathography, and his story provokes inevitable questions regarding the relation between artistic genius and psychopathology (Nagera, 1967; Lubin, 1972; Gedo, 1983; Spitz, 1985). My purpose in the present discussion is not to cover ground that has already been covered by analytic scholars, but to explore one specific aspect of Vincent's character pathology—the role of shame in his life and its effects on his artistic career and on his artistic productivity. I will argue that a major focus in understanding Vincent's psychopathology must lie in the