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The story of Van Gogh 'is a never-ending struggle to control, modify, glorify or deny a deep-rooted melancholy and loneliness'. Lest this statement sound like another old-fashioned, simplistic reduction of creativity to pathology, let me hasten to add that it is not. Cultural, historical, art-historical, and contemporary influences are skilfully woven together in the light of sophisticated analytic insight, supported by clinical data, to present a tormented human being whose art was fed by depression while transcending it.
The source of Vincent's depression, according to the author, was a deficiency in maternal care in the face of his mother's chronic melancholy following her first-born child's death. The Van Gogh's first child, named Vincent, died at one year of age. Exactly one year later another boy was born and also named Vincent. He lived his early years around the corner from his brother's grave. In Vincent's words, 'The germinating seed must not be exposed to a frosty wind—that was the case with me from the beginning'. He saw himself as the unhappy outsider, 'a rough dog with wet paws', ignored by a mother grieving for the earlier Vincent who lay buried nearby. This childhood setting fostered his identification with the poor and oppressed whom he often nursed. Therein, too, lay his fascination with burial grounds, mines, cellars, digging scenes, shovels, and the potato (another buried object). The author suggests that some of the artist's French landscapes may be transformed graveyards.
Vincent developed an envious identification with the dead Vincent, 'made almost inevitable by the mysterious coincidence of name and birth date. In the fantasy of his artistic life he alternated