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Van Gogh's combination of psychopathology and innovative artistic creativity has held a fascination for many.1 Most of his would-be interpreters have become preoccupied with attempts to establish a diagnosis and some, like Irving Stone, took off into a fantasy 'correction' of the sad tale of his life. Dr. Nagera fills a need by providing a very readable, well thought out study of the life and struggles of this great artist.
Vincent was the second child of an inept, rigid, moralizing country preacher and a 'spinsterly', unsympathetic mother. The cards were stacked against him before his birth when the couple's first son was stillborn and they decided that their next child would be a more perfect version of the same child—returned to them by God. Accordingly, they gave him the same name and approached the child with a highly ambivalent, magically tainted expectation. Vincent not only failed to fulfil their exalted ideas, but was 'difficult in temper, troublesome and self-willed'. Apparently, he was early and repeatedly rejected, and became progressively more solitary, withdrawn, and preoccupied with nature. By the age of twelve he was sent away to school, and later for an apprenticeship. He responded to both with homesickness, taking the separation from his father especially hard and depressively.
While away in London, unhappy but doing well as an art dealer's apprentice, he suffered a disappointment in his first love which 'led to severe regression and a breakdown in his ability to relate to others, in his reality adaptation and affective life'. The pattern of defiance, failure, and self-destructive behavior became dominant in Vincent's life from then on, interspersed with his attempts to find a life, a career, a solution for himself. It is interesting to reflect that his life style was one which might now be called 'hippy' with his shabby, dirty, and peculiar clothes, general untidiness, defiance, and alienation of 'bourgeois' associates, dependence on drugs