You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Several interrelated meanings are suggested to explain Vincent van Gogh's self-mutilation. Its occurrence at Christmas time was not accidental; since 1878, Christmas had become a time of intensified feelings of isolation, loneliness, and depression. Vincent's masochistic fascination with bodily injury served as a defense against these feelings, for injury was associated with being cared for and loved. Further, he related injury and Christmas gifts. The box on the ears as a child, cited as the epitome of childhood relations with mother, gave proof that an ear injury, in particular, brings a mother's love. Prostitutes substituted for his rejected, rejecting mother, so it is not too surprising that he brought his Christmas token to one of them, intending to evoke a gift of love in return. In 1888, his brother Theo's imminent marriage increased the fear of isolation; the mutilation alleviated the fear by bringing Theo to him. Similarly, it stimulated the Roulins to nurse him, fulfilling a wish that reflected an envious identification with their baby.
The mutilation also represented a symbolic death, exhibiting Vincent in the image of his dead brother, the first Vincent—someone mother adored. As a gift, the severed ear was specifically the gift of a baby, a dead baby. Thus it was both a reliving of Oedipal wishes and a bitter mockery of his mother's attachment to her dead son. The sadomasochistically perceived primal scene offered its own contribution, perhaps induced by the Arles bullfights. In cutting off his ear, Vincent acted out the primal scene; at the same time he symbolically displayed himself to a mother-surrogate as a castrated, nonthreatening person. He was not the brute or the roughneck his mother believed him to be; rather he was the victim who needed her and deserved to be nursed by her.