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Vincent van Gogh remains one of the giants of nineteenth-century art—his works are treasures drawing millions from avid collectors and have become choice targets for enterprising art thieves. Vincent1 was also one of the most tragic figures in the history of art. He led a life of desperate poverty, near starvation, rejection, and alienation rivaled by few of the great artists. The woeful tale of his life's journey came to an end in severe mental illness and finally suicide (Meissner, 1992b, 1994). These themes found their way inexorably onto the canvases that flowed from his brush and took shape in the vivid images so familiar to art lovers.
We can hypothesize that the tormented and alienated character of Vincent's world came into being in the matrix of his family, and was in large measure determined by the circumstances of his childhood and family experience. I will argue that his pathological sense of self was shaped by unconscious dynamic forces at work in his family system (Bowen, 1978)—a family system carrying a high degree of pathological potential, reflected in the scope of identifiable pathology in Vincent and his siblings. My purpose in the present essay is to bring together some of what we know of Vincent's family background and relationships that might cast some light on these aspects of Vincent's ill-fated career. What, then, can we discern of the tangled web of family emotional involvements that might help us to better understand this tormented genius?
If we look back over several generations of the van Gogh family, the themes of religion and art permeate the family history. Vincent's father, Theodorus, was a pastor in the Dutch Reform