Thesis

The relationship between madness and genius fascinates the lay person and expert alike. Most geniuses are not mad and madness doesn’t guarantee creativity. Creative individuals may be of insane temperament, their insanity traits hinder creativity.

Confusion regarding the difference is not surprising when one considers that a mad person has lost contact with reality, while a genius presents a new and unusual view of reality.

My study of Vincent van Gogh should clarify this distinction. Vincent van Gogh suffered from mental illness but never lost touch with reality which is manifested in his letters and art. I analyzed Vincent from a sociological, religious and psycho-developmental perspective and came to a conclusion that his works were produced by an inner necessity and his creativity gave him during the time of illness a sense of wholeness, self-expansion and growth.

The Greeks spoke of the search for the principle of the “Good Life”. The Romans had a phrase, “Mens sana in corore sano.” Psychoanalysts today talk about an integrated “Ego.” For ages, men and women have been seeking a style of life and spirit that achieves a wholeness, an integration, an authenticity of mind, body, soul, reason, passion, and desire. These days, the search is left to psychologists, therapists, and the religious to holistically and spiritually integrate the body.

Researchers avoided the subject of creativity because they perceived it as unscientific, mysterious, disturbing and too corruptive for the scientific training of graduate students. Today, researchers are focusing on the concept that creativity and healing, once fugitive and ubiquitous, are the marks of human nature, itself.

Whether in business, the arts, politics or personal relationships, creativity involves “going beyond the information given” to create something authentic in the world. When the mind exercises the creative muscle, it also generates a sense of well-being, pleasure, joy and ecstasy. Feelings can include frustration, fear, anxiety or despair.

Authentic art can create a war against oneself and one can become the vessel where the force goes through, and that feeling can be the closest in experience to a spiritual encounter. The creative experience can be quiet or full of wonder, but whatever the specific sensation, creativity carries with it a powerful sense of the mind working at the peak of its ability.

In analyzing Vincent van Gogh’s art, I had an opportunity to transform myself from being symbolically impoverished towards a meaningful connection to the man: his traits, generic attitudes, experiences, struggles, ecstasies and torments.

What do stars, sun, trees, clouds, fields, sowers and reapers mean? Should it signify anything? Vincent’s art work came out of a struggle to be helpless or helpful. He overcame the struggle by engaging his internal force to a canvas and set his spirits free. He experienced the pain of poverty and was able to communicate symbolically his feeling. The authentic expression freed him from the constraints which were psychologically with him. The creative process allowed his psyche to heal and restore him to wholeness. This ongoing process fostered personal growth and gave him a greater understanding to his inner self and his environment.

His letters to Theo, his brother, revealed that healing through the creative process is possible. Images came from the depth of his psyche and he trusted them. His inner wisdom was his guide and his creative source. When faced with conflict, he allowed himself to go to the abyss. The unknown was painful and dangerous to him, but he faced it successfully and transformed himself spiritually. When he created he found the inner peace, the intangibles which a materialistic world could not provide.

Vincent felt responsible for his disease and during various hospitalizations he gave ease to other people. Disease must have something constructive about it. Out of this struggle came the capacity to sense his own vulnerability and his ability to relate with the less fortunate. He became an instrument of healing.

On his pilgrimage towards wholeness, Vincent’s clarity of vision and truthfulness to nature on canvas contain symbols that bring us in contact with our spirituality and could work as a healing agent. Vincent’s spirituality provided a sense of meaning and purpose to life, a connection to the transcendent and a connectedness to other sojourners who accompany one on life’s journey.

In this turbulent journey, these spiritual qualities fortified Vincent to survive the ravages of his disease. In expressing his feeling, he found the meaning in the chronic nature of his illness, learned to appreciate the gift of health and found strength to come back time and again from the pits of depression to the seductive highs of mania. The unconditional love provided by Theo empowered Vincent to hang tough and to accept medical intervention. His creativity served as a safety rope that kept him from drowning in the black waters of the depression.

Vincent was never medically intervened and research indicates that the medical course of bi-polar disease worsens over time (the attacks become more frequent and more severe) and choosing death over life was Vincent’s flight from extreme despair, turmoil, and psychosis.

Vincent’s art reveals the journey of a man who took an inward ascent and found divine order within himself. He achieved his ascent through scrupulous spiritual discipline. He trained himself to concentrate exclusively on contemplation, prayer, inner silence and never permitted himself to be distracted by idle thoughts and day dreaming. He achieved complete self mastery through voluntary suffering. This self training gave him inner power and purity which provided the psychic strength that brought him closer to the divine light.

He established permanent contact with the higher self, or at least the ability to concentrate when necessary. He expressed beauty, as well as truth and goodness, because these qualities were reflected in everything he did, just as the presence of light dispelled shadows.

The law governing the effect of light on darkness applies equally to the spiritual and to the physical world. It is the same law with two aspects, one visible, and sensory, the other invisible and psychic. He painted this principle to illustrate the invisible in terms of the visible. For example, the absence of shadow indicates a luminous world where God is present and therefore there can be no outside source of light. The beings depicted are themselves sources of light.

Vincent’s philosophy was the idea that the world was created by the entry of spirit into matter, and that light was primarily spiritual. He understood that its component elements are color. Knowing that the law of spirit and matter operates at all levels, he demonstrated by his use of color the descent of the divine spirit into the world of humanity. His art is a physical celebration of the divine manifestation, both in the cosmos and in himself.

Whatever possessed Vincent to shoot himself (whether it was the fear of the ravaging torments of his disease, or a fit of anxiety after hearing troubling news from Theo, the brother on whom he was both so financially and emotionally dependent), he was obviously not the ceaselessly tormented genius he is still sometimes portrayed as being. In analyzing his work during his hospitalization, his art showed no signs of pathology and a few weeks before he committed suicide his sister-in-law described him as a broad-shouldered man with a healthy color, a smile on his face and a resolute appearance. This is confirmed by Vincent’s letter to Theo, “I still love art and life very much indeed.”

Vincent’s art, his nachlass has triumphed. His art became a bread and wine that everyone could share, he took his faith in the salt of the earth and transformed it into his gospel and exposed feelings and emotions in such way that they cannot be ignored, rationalized, or erased.

I will explore van Gogh’s art from a personal, clinical and psycho analytical perspective. Further, the importance of the art process as an interplay between the developing esthetic formal properties of the artwork and the artist’s association to it, conscious or unconscious will be stressed. I will include the issues of Vincent’s aesthetic ordering to his content and the rescues from the threat of unknown and predictable chaos. Also, I will explain the importance of unity, form and content with the integration of inner and outer experiences.

The relationships between artist and environment, and between reality and canvas are richly convoluted and layered into ambiguities. I will explore some of these layers in treating Vincent as a patient.

Vincent was born on the 30 March 1853, at Zundert, a small village in Brabant, Holland. His father, Theodore, the village pastor, came from a pastor’s family of twelve children. Three of .Vincent’s uncles were picture-dealers and one of them, also called Vincent, owned a business at The Hague.

Theodore and his wife, Anna Cornelia, had seven children, four sons, Vincent, Vincent, Theo and Cornelius and three daughters, Anna, Elisabeth and Wilhelmina. The first born son, called Vincent, was stillborn. The family was a united one, where the domestic virtues and religion were the foundation of society. The van Gogh’s were middle-class citizens living in a narrow and restrictive Calvinistic austerity that did not tolerate any emergence of deviant behavior. Vincent was extremely sensitive and his earliest years profoundly influenced his character.

Vincent mastered elementary school. When he was 15 years old, Vincent suffered his first bout of melancholia and became increasingly hard to manage. After abruptly leaving high school, his home atmosphere became tense, anxious, full of fears and prohibitions. After high school, Vincent spent years in Brussels (The Hague), London, Amsterdam, Etten (The Borinage), Paris and later the region of southern France.

In his earlier years, Vincent’s behavior grew pathological. He showed signs of erratic outbursts, developed night terrors, had hallucinations and encountered a personal crisis of faith. He neglected his body, looked emaciated, slept on clay floors in defecated buildings, was unkempt, unshaven and verbally abusive. At home again, he rejected all authority, started to paint and maintained a log containing letters to his brother Theo. His personality deteriorated rapidly. Hs first major crisis, which required hospitalization, was the onset of the down spiraling disease of insanity. His suicide at the age of 37 ended the torment of emotional euphoria, hyperactivity, insomnia, flight of ideas, hyper sexuality and extreme sadness and despair.

Cain and Cain (1964) indicate that Vincent asked himself frequently the question: Who am I and where shall I go? Letters to his brother Theo reveal how deeply this question affected him. To understand his questioning, one has to focus on the unusual circumstances affecting van Gogh’s infancy.

One year to the day before van Gogh was born, his mother gave birth to a stillborn child, named Vincent. Van Gogh’s mother’s grief was intense when Vincent was conceived and born. Even though she was happy at his birth, she proudly acclaimed that Vincent was an excellent replacement for his departed brother. Some chronologies include in the family book of birth the words: “The Eldest Surviving Son.”

Sabbadini (vol. 32) believes that the word “Surviving” is the key to an initial understanding of Vincent’s inability to live easily with himself or others. Vincent could only attain the perfection of his brother’s unrealized life by suffering and ultimately dying—a prospect made particularly vivid by the presence of the other Vincent’s tombstone. The first Vincent was buried in the graveyard of the church where his father was pastor. The second Vincent, our Vincent, saw this tombstone with his name on at least once a week and perhaps more than that, since he spent his formative years just around the corner from that graveyard. So, the question which haunted him for his short life arose: Who am I? Does my life belong to another?

Lubin’s (1972) research indicates that Van Gogh’s central unconscious fantasy is about his departed brother. By being a boisterous child, “a rough dog with wet paws,” he tried to gain his mother’s attention and affection. She acknowledged Vincent’s artistic creativity and encouraged him to further his talents.

With limited patience for Vincent’s stoic behavior, his father encouraged him to study and follow his ministry that he had proudly presented to his “First Born.” To please his father and to relieve his preoccupation with death and rebirth, he enthusiastically accepted the call to become a missionary and the role of a Christ. He had rules to follow as to study the will of another, rather than his own. He had to chose to have less than more. He had to seek always the lowest place in society and stay inferior to everyone. He had to wish and pray that the will of God be wholly fulfilled because he was able to enter the kingdom of heaven. To make his flesh obey, Vincent engaged in masochistic behavior. He practiced self-chastisement, beating himself with a whip. He served the poor, the sick and downtrodden, always abasing himself by having less than they. Feeling idle and useless in the world, he eventually suffered a spiritual crisis.

If he wouldn’t be Vincent, for he was a replacement with no right, than he would imitate Christ and have a life which was meaningful towards a goal. A goal that he reached through preaching and then, after he failed as a preacher, through the paintings which became his sermon. He seemed to relieve his frustration and anxieties through his paintings. He painted stars and suns beyond his grasp and expressed deep feelings about human conditions. In his identification with the crucified Christ, the masochistic use of depression enabled him to accept unhappiness and death.

“I prefer feeling my sorrow, sorrow is better than laughter,” Van Gogh wrote in Letter 82A to Theo as he became the wanderer of Christ. His restlessness and agonizing uncertainty threw him into love affairs with cousins, prostitutes and daughters of upper-class society. Fleeing pictures of those encounters were manifested in his sub consciousness and eventually, he freed it on canvas. With the death of his father in 1885, he decided to become an artist and enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Art. Sick again due to malnutrition, overwork and heavy smoking, his journey led him to Paris. His need to search for a father figure led him to “Pere Tangue’s” workshop. Restlessness and interpersonal relationship difficulties with his brother, Theo, led Vincent, the wanderer, to travel to the bright light of the southern region of France. Dreams to build an artistic colony which would eliminate all material need did not materialize. Vincent’s attack on Gauguin is followed by self- mutilation and hospitalization. The financial difficulties of being an emotional and monetary supplier to Vincent’s needs brought his brother and family into a crisis. After writing his last letter to his brother, Vincent goes out into a desolated cornfield and shoots himself. After Vincent’s death, his brother’s sorrow increased. He died a half year later and lies buried next to Vincent’s grave.

Vincent’s psychiatric illness was mostly known and written about during the period in Arles. To justify his emotional state, one cannot overlook the important aspects leading to his major breakdown. Since there is no medical and psychiatric history from doctors who would have been able to diagnostically classify him, various theories of schizophrenia, alcoholism, epilepsy, or major depressive illness mystify the psycho historians and lay people.

Vincent’s illness stems from an emotional imbalance, a lability and a genetic predisposition to mental illness. His illness follows the psycho-developmental process with anticipated crisis. Vincent was not psychologically strong enough to whether the “Sturm and Drang” years of a normal adolescence. Normal stressors during childhood and adolescence resulted in an unresolved separation-individuation process. Vincent’s sensitive nature could not handle losses, rejection and maturation.

In 1873, the first signs of illness were noticed during his stay in London. Fear of

separation from parents and homeland and rejection from his first love left Vincent in utter despair. The severe depression shook his emotional stability and his equilibrium and he regressed to the security of his home. Total isolation and loss of affect left him stranded from his first job.

He tried to reconstruct his life to find some type of emotional equilibrium and intellectual stability. A new form of sublimation, his religious pursuit and missionary work with the miners in the Borinage and his artistic endeavors, gave temporary psychic numbness to his mental suffering. The total break, the act of suicide, is the highlight of an arduous journey in darkness and light.

Vincent van Gogh was a complete failure in everything that seemed important to his contemporaries. He never started a family, nor earned a living, nor kept long-term friendships. His art allowed him the chance to organize his surrounding chaos and, thereby, gave him some type of equilibrium.

As with so many artists, his artistic talents were only recognized after his death. A “Genius” got discovered, and he became an “instant” hero. Van Gogh’s decision to become an artist was finalized about 1880. His drawings in the settings of the Parisian art dealers were reminiscent of historical and contemporary works. After his failure in various bourgeois professions and his rejection from his social ambitions, he seized on what he knew in theory and practice. His brother, Theo, and Uncle Mauve gave him constant support to further his talent.

Laboring peasants and miners appealed to him and he tried to transmit their mood to his own emotional feeling. Influenced by The “Golden Age” of the Dutch Baroque, Vincent ventured out to paint in oil and abstraction. He mastered the quality of tone combination and moved into the realm of conventialism. The tone and quality of color in the earlier stages became pictorial music in an age of Impressionism.

In feverish contemplation, Vincent searched to be different. He made several attempts at a mature painting but in vain. He obviously yearned for a breakthrough that would bring deliverance. His desire for artistic differentiation was not his only concern, he wanted to become famous and sell his work. Vincent experimented with the Impressionist brush strokes and the pointillist technique of stippling. He also tried out the decorative potential of Japanese prints. Artistic innovations were his motivation to become noticed; radical experiments with color and modern palette of saturated complementary colors. The southern region of France gave him the light and brilliance of outdoor painting. Broad brush strokes with impasto quality, inventive line perspectives, limited use of colors, contour style in decorative settings. His intense colors were not taken directly from nature. Brilliant yellows and deepest saturated blues were juxtaposed to one another.

It was only his painting which bound him to life - to a life of which all he asked was pictures-landscapes. They resembled him, tortured him, both trees in convulsion and landscapes, unstable, obstructed and in motion. He painted troubled skies, crossed with lightning, spinning stars, where the sun-his own reason-reeled in its battle with darkness. With vigor he captured the cataclysmic world of stormy movement seen in sloping mountains, tumultuous hills and rocks with gigantic clouds, restless branches and rapid streams, agitated trees with broken trunks, vast fields with wheat, sowers, reapers and ravens lurking into space filled his art. It was as if converging paths led nowhere, asylums gleamed in madness and raging prisoners followed their doom.

His story, wrote Wilhelm Uhde (1990), is not that of an eye, a palette, a brush, but is the tale of a lonely heart which beat within the walls of a dark prison, longing and suffering without knowing why, until one day it saw the sun, and in the sun recognized the secret of life. It flew towards it and was consumed in its rays.

Van Gogh suffered from bipolar illness. This area on depression will analyze the categories of depressive illness, effects and treatments. Depressive disorders come in different forms, just as do other illness’, such as heart disease. There are several forms of depressive illness’ which vary in the number of symptoms, severity, and persistence. Depending on whether the patient is talking to a clinician, researcher, psychologist or art therapist, his or her illness may be referred to as major, clinical, melancholic, unipolar or endogenous depressions or dysthymia These differing terms can be confusing if the patient doesn’t realize that they are overlapping and not mutually exclusive. (Classnotes: Dr. Henderson).

· Loss of interest or pleasure in hobbies and activities that were once enjoyed, including sex

· Persistent physical symptoms that do not respond to treatment, such as headaches, digestive disorders, and chronic pain

Four of these symptoms must be present nearly every day for at least two weeks in order to classify as Major depression and professional help is strongly recommended. These disabling episodes of depression can occur once, twice, or several times in a lifetime.

A less severe type of depression, dysthymia, involves long-term, chronic symptoms that do not disable, but keep you from functioning at “full steam” or from feeling good. Sometimes people with dysthymia also experience major depressive episodes. Dysthymics are usually morose, introverted, over conscientious, and incapable of fun (Akiska1,1983). The syndrome is approximately as prevalent as major depression and more common in women. (Weissman, Leaf, Bruce, et al., 1988).

The term clinical is a general term applied to any depression where symptoms are severe and lasting enough to require treatment. Major indicates a clinical depression that needs specific diagnostic criteria as to duration, functional impairment, and involvement of a cluster of both physiological and psychological symptoms. Melancholia is a severe form of a major depression typified by a set of physiological symptoms which respond to antidepressant medication. Unipolar means that the individual suffers from a major depression, but not from manic-depressive disorder, which is called bipolar illness. The disorder of endogenous depression (coming from within) manifests itself by a cluster of more biological symptoms, such as sleep disturbance and weight loss. Endogenous are likely to be classified as reactive depression, experiencing “precipitating” events in the three months prior to the onset of their episodes. ( Bebbington, et al., 1988).

Another type of mood disorder is bipolar disorder, formerly called manic-depressive illness and classified as the major depression as mental illness. Not nearly as prevalent as other forms of depressive disorders, bipolar disorder involves cycles of depression and elation or mania. Sometimes the mood switches are dramatic and rapid, but most often they are gradual. When in the depressed cycle, you can experience any or all the symptoms of a depressive disorder.

Manic individuals tend to overlook the painful or harmful consequences of their behavior. They may incur horrendous debts; behave promiscuously; make poor business decisions; lose friends, family, and employment; and may even break the law and land in jail. Their impulsive and often irrational manic behaviors put them at particular risk for committing crimes (Kunjukrishnan & Bradford, 1988), having accidents, and committing suicide (Barner-Rassmussen, 1986).

Current data indicates that some bipolar patients do not progress beyond the stage of cyclothymia, i.e., short mood swings between low mood, inactivity and fatigue to high mood, high energy and overconfidence, but in a certain number of cases they will crystallize into bipolar disorder (Depue et al., 1981). Other bipolar patients experience severe depressions with mild elevations of mood and activity known as hypomania. Thus, manic episodes represent a more severe form of the malady. In extreme cases with psychotic illness, bipolar patients jump from one idea to another with no apparent connection; others experience delusions and hallucinations.

Delusions are not limited to mania. When a clinical depression becomes especially severe, delusions are not uncommon. Depressive delusions represent exaggerated feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, or guilt, such as feeling responsible for all the evil in the world.

Perry (1990) note that manic-depressive illness was identified at the turn of the century by Emil Kraeplin, an Edinburgh psychiatrist, who described several hundred cases in his care and made it clear that this was not a rare disorder. On the basis of his detailed observation, he was able to differentiate dementia praecox from manic-depressive psychosis. Since that time, the far more common among the artists than among the others. For example, the rate of alcoholism was 60% among actors and 41% among novelists, but only 3% among those in the physical sciences and 10% among military officers. In the case of manic depression, 17 % of the actors and 13% of the poets were thought to have the disorder.

Observing the striking concordance between emotional volatility and creativity, some researchers are now seeking to understand the neurobiological basis of both mental instability and creativity.

As classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in Bipolar Disease (DSM-III-R), both symptoms of depression and mania have to be present. Occasionally, a person will have a manic episode, or a series of manic episodes, with no subsequent episode of depression. They involve only one “pole”, but still classified as bipolar disorder and respond to the same medication as the classic bipolar disorder. DSM-IV will be the fourth edition and distinctly revised due to a greater degree of scientific evidence. Bipolar II Disorder, in which a person’s mood swing between intense depression and “hypomania”, a feeling of elation that is less extreme than the manic mood typical of manic-depression, is a new diagnosis and helps to prevent serious mistakes in prescribing medication. If a psychiatrist misses the fact that such a patient has mood swings, and incorrectly makes a diagnosis of ordinary depression, the treatment is likely to be with anti-depressants alone rather than with lithium added, the standard treatment for manic-depression. With bipolar patients, antidepressant alone can actually worsen the problem by “shortening the time between episodes”, says Dr. Frances, a diagnostic expert in an article by Goleman in the New York Times, April 19, 1994.

The onset of bipolar disorders will first appear in late adolescence at the average age of 20, a figure that has remained stable over the past century (Baptista, 1989). Some people have infrequent mild episodes and do not seek treatment or even recognize that they are ill. Typically, episodes of illness’ are time-limited: they come and go, last from several days to several months, and are followed by relatively normal periods of mood behavior. Without treatment, the frequency of illness, as well as the severity of symptoms, tends to increase over years.

Bipolar disorders occur in both two sexes with equal frequency and are more prevalent among higher socioeconomic groups and does not discriminate against single or a married status. Genetic evidence shows that first degree relatives of people with bipolar mood disorder are far more likely than other people to develop this disorder. In contrast to a 0.4 to 0. 8 percent prevalence of bipolar disorder in the general population, first degree relatives of bipolar patients show a 17 percent prevalence.

More than 75 percent of individuals with the illness of bipolar disease respond well to medical treatment and can lead productive, useful, and reasonable stable satisfying lives. Without proper medical treatment, many such persons suffer repeated periods of illness, hospitalization, and loss of productive living.

Mood disorders are medical illness’ that produce emotional symptoms. A common-sense treatment plan involves treating the medical symptoms as well as learning how to recognize one’s own patterns of illness and developing ways of coping with them. Aside from taking the medication prescribed by the doctor, many patients and their families find help in various counseling sessions.

Treatment is directed at lessening the duration and intensity of the episodes and preventing recurrences.

The medication lithium carbonate was introduced for the treatment of mania and bipolar affective disorder in the early 1950’s. It has a powerful mood stabilizer effect and can be used safely. It is not a sedative or an euphoric drug, but prevents extremes of mood, either high or low. 80% of bipolar patients respond to lithium.

Lithium’s main benefit lies in the prevention of episodes and in treating an episode after it has occurred. Manic and depressive attacks occur less frequently and are less severe when lithium is taken regularly.

A medical evaluation including medical history, physical examination, and simple laboratory tests of blood and urine are needed. Because lithium is almost entirely eliminated from the body by the kidneys, laboratory tests of kidney function are done before starting lithium and at regular intervals thereafter. Tests of thyroid function are also advised since lithium may occasionally cause goiter (a harmless, treatable enlargement of the thyroid gland) or a mild decrease in thyroid function, hypothyroidism. A blood test of the level of thyroid hormones is usually done at regular intervals.

Whether a person should remain on long-term therapy after an episode has ended depends on many individual factors as prior severity, duration, and pattern of recurrence of illness in the patient. If episodes are minor or widely separated, long term medication may not be necessary.

Lithium is non-sedating and side effects are rare. It is not addicting. It is safe at appropriate dosages, although when taken in excess it can produce intoxication and potentially dangerous side effects. The following early side effects are common and usually subside for several days:

With the exception of single large overdoses, lithium intoxication is usually of gradual onset. Loss of appetite, vomiting and diarrhea, fatigue, weakness, unsteadiness, slurred speech, muscle twitching, and severe shakiness. Although poisoning is rare with careful medical supervision, it is important to be aware of these symptoms and to recognize them. Severe intoxication or poisoning can lead to seizures, confusion, coma, and possible death. (Schvehla, 1987).

Lithium is sometimes used together with major tranquilizers (such as Mellaril, Thorazine, Prolixin, Haldol, and Navane), or benzodiazepines-Valium-like drugs-(Klonopine and Ativan) especially in the initial phase of treatment of acute mania. These two classes of drugs have been safely used together for years in thousand of patients. Recent clinical experiences sounds a cautionary note for bipolar patients using tricyclic antidepressants or monoamine oxidase inhibitors during their depressions. For some, their use may induce hypo mania or mania, and over time the frequency of cycles may be increased. (Papolos, 1987).

In conjunction with psychopharmacology, one should not dismiss issues of religious belief and spirituality to the care of a patient who is struggling with a psychiatric disorder such as bipolar disease. Since the genetic chromosome and personality theories are still in embryonic stages we as art therapist could enhance the ego development of a suffering patient. Dr. Harold Koplewicz, a psychiatrist working on the child and adolescent unit of Long Island Jewish Medical Center mentions about the healing effects of expressive therapies as an alternative to the traditional verbal therapy techniques. Margret Naumburg, (1973), a pioneer in art therapy stated: “As soon as original art work is encouraged, instead of dependence on models and specific techniques, the focus of a patient’s art activity is modified. He or she will begin to draw on his own inner resources and this will inevitability lead to some expression of the conflicts within the personality. Such release, drawn from both the conscious and the unconscious levels, may, in itself, have a distinctly therapeutic effect on the patient”,

Art therapy builds on the pioneering work of Carl Jung, (1960). He saw value in drawings containing symbols from the unconscious that brings as in contact with our spirituality and could work as a healing agent. An individual’s spirituality usually provides a sense of meaning and purpose to life, a connection to the Transcendent (however that transcendent entity being is personally understood), and a connectedness to other sojourners who accompany one on Life’s journey.

Although, many people use the terms “spirituality” and “religious belief’ interchangeable, and spirituality often encompasses religious belief, it can have a broader meaning. Many deeply spiritual individuals have no formal ties to organizational religion. Since bipolar disease affects not only the patient but everyone he or she is connected to, art therapy created a non threatening environment whereby one can explore the meaning of existence and suffering.

Victor Frankl (1963) was the first psychiatrist to note the importance of spiritual health to emotional and physical well-being. Frankl’s experiences as a prisoner of war in a Nazi concentration camp exposed him to the worst in human nature, but also to the best. He was impressed that under the most bestial of conditions, some people were still able to choose how they would respond. These people would share their last piece of bread with someone who was hungry, or would comfort and console a fellow prisoner who was ill or grieving for a loved one. These people still were able to give of themselves and in some way transform the awfulness of their surroundings with love. They had qualities that Frankl identified as spiritual - the ability to find meaning and purpose, to love, and to choose how one will respond in a given situation.

These same qualities allow people diagnosed with major depression or bipolar disorder to survive the ravages of the disease. Through these spiritual qualities explored during art therapy sessions, the individual finds meaning in the chronic nature of the illness; learns to appreciate the gift of health; and finds strength to come back time and again from a pit of depression or the seductive highs of mania. We lend our ego, love, hope, and concern to the ever struggling patient. Such love frequently is the factor that empowers the patient to “hang tough” or to accept both medical and therapeutical intervention. Our own spirituality can serve as a safety rope that keeps the patient from drowning in the black waters of the depression or flying to high in the face of a manic episode.

Does an awareness of spirituality explored during art therapy sessions discount the need for medication or psychotherapy? Absolutely not! All these sources of healing work together and enhances insight and growth on different levels. (Gilliland,1989).

Historians consider Van Gogh as a symbolist. Clinical art therapists study symbols as a means to gain insight into a person’s psyche. Nelson (1916) states that a symbol is a sign and differs from an antitype, which is a prefigurement of something or something or someone to come afterwards; and from an allegory, which is a figurative description. The symbol is always an object, and suggests something higher than appears to the eye.

A symbol refers to something so deep and complex that consciousness, limited as it is, cannot grasp it all at once. In this way, the symbol always carries an element of the unknown and the inexplicable, that which is not amenable to words, and which often has a numinous quality. We know the fact that symbols exist and tell the meaning behind these symbols. In the tension between knowing and not-knowing, between conscious and unconscious lies a great deal of psychic energy.

Carl Gustav Jung (1976) suggested that symbols or what he called primordial images, dominants, or archetypes have the following attributes:

I call the image primordial when it possesses an archaic character. I speak of its archaic character, when the image is in striking accord with familiar mythological motifs.

It then expresses material primarily derived from the collective unconscious, and indicates at the same time the collective rather than personal. A personal image has neither an archaic character nor a collective significance, but expresses contents of the personal unconscious and a personally conditioned conscious situation

The primordial image, elsewhere also termed archetype, is always collective, i.e., it is at least common to entire peoples or epochs. In all probability the most important mythological motifs are common to all times and races.

As the principal traits of these motifs, Jung (1954) mentions “chaotic complexity and order, duality, the opposition of light and darkness, above and below, right and left, the unification of opposites in the third, the quaternary (square, cross), the rotation (circle, sphere), and, finally, centricity and radial arrangements organized, as a rule, according to a quaternary system.

Symbols, according to Jung are “pregnant with meaning” and “image and meaning” are identical. He stresses that the symbol unlocks unconscious psychic energy and allows it to flow toward a natural level, where a transforming effect occurs. With more psychic energy available and flowing, the individual encountering a difficulty now has the possibility of pulling unconscious elements into consciousness, dealing with them, and thus transcending the problem. The problem no longer has the individual, but instead, the individual has a hold on the problem.

How does one activate the healing power of the symbol? First of all, Tavris (1990) points out that one has to bring it into consciousness and to allow its connected energy to flow. Flow is important, for it illuminates the accuracy of what philosophers have been saying for centuries: that the way to happiness lies not in mindless hedonism but in mindful challenge, not in having unlimited opportunities but in focused possibilities, not in self-absorption but in absorption in the world, not in having it done for you but in doing it yourself. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the unlived life is not worth examining.

Tavris (1990) suggests to examine the symbol, write about it or bring its association and amplification to consciousness are means of accomplishing it.

Ester Harding (1961) answers the question of how to activate power from the symbol to obtain healing:

It seems that for a reconciling or redemptive symbol to be fully effective four conditions must be fulfilled. First, the individual must be deeply concerned over his need; second, he must have struggled to the utmost of his ability to find a conscious way out of his dilemma; third, the symbol itself must express the life process of the unconscious, active in this particular individual; and, lastly, he must grasp the meaning of the symbol that is presented to him, not only with his mind but with his heart also, and must act upon its teaching. (p. 17)

Edith Wallace is a M.D., Ph.D. and editor of various books. Her workshop (1990) in Washington D.C. was based on the Jungian Philosophy and how the creative process works in the subconscious mind and the struggle to release creative instincts. According to her lecture, she believes that creativity is an ongoing process and we just have to allow ourselves to free the mind and let the creative flow occur. With the help of her own paintings she demonstrated how the unconscious works and its ability to free the path of obstacles during the creative activity. She emphasized the Jungian principle that man does not strive for wholeness, he or she is born with it. What we have to do through our life is to develop this inherent wholeness to the greatest degree possible.

Wallace believes in the Jungian Archetypes as a content of the collective unconscious which is universal. They must be advantageous to the individual and to the race, otherwise they would not become part of man’s inherent nature. She stressed that creative people need to have a periodic withdrawal from the world in order to recover one’s balance. Many times she stepped down in the abyss, the dark unknown that frightens everyone. Wallace’s paintings reveal the darkness of her spirit but a glimpse of light was not far away. She believes on choices, going toward the light or regress back to those muddy, dark stairs leading to the abyss.

Tension, conflict, stress, and strain are all feelings that arise from imbalances in the psyche. Creative processes allow a flow of insight towards conflicting ideas and balance will occur. Regression was beneficial to her. Wallace took it as an opportunity for renewal.

Dr. Wallace stresses that most of the creative people are the introverted intuitive type personalities. An intuitive introverted person is often regarded as an enigma by his friends and as a misunderstood genius by him or herself. Most of the time, they lose touch with reality and therefore unable to communicate effectively to others. Their art work is the link to the outside world.

Freud’s theory (1913) is based of layers of unconsciousness. The deepest and most inaccessible is the unconscious and the most accessible but not in awareness is the preconscious mind. What we are aware of is our consciousness. The most primitive or forbidden impulse is the id. The id needs to be constantly satisfied and if not, emerges in disguised forms. Only when disguised, are the able to pass the “censor”. Repressed wishes and impulses manifest themselves in psychological symptoms. According to Freud, the creative person experiences a need to represent his conflict or his ungratified wishes by artwork.

Art is a facilitator to release those hidden wishes in a cathartic and communicative sense. In a manner analogous to dream work, art work utilizes primary process mechanism to distort and disguise visual motor percepts. The formulation of a primary-process class is often an unconscious mechanism. With the help of the secondary process, an external representation of the percepts is expressed in visual forms.

Sublimation is based on a Freudian psychoanalytical theory. It embraces a multitude of mechanism. The include displacement, symbolization, neutralization and drive energy, identification and integration. Sublimation is a powerful defense mechanism, highly sophisticated and usually postpones instinctual gratification and channels of the drive energy. It requires ego strength and intelligence and involves the primary and secondary thinking process.

Faced with anxiety and fear, our ego mobilizes many defenses as denial, projection, reaction-formation and sublimation. The expressive art is a story of transformation. It stimulates sublimation and the conscious, preconscious and unconscious processes.

MacGregor (1992) pointed out that Freud and Jung recognized the existence of a “phylogenetic heritage.” “Fixed dream symbols” are common to all mankind and coexist with the more common private symbols in the individual unconscious. Vacharro (1973) feels that Freud posits that all weapons and tools are used as symbols for the male organ; e.g., plough share, hammer, gun, revolver, dagger, sword, etc. Many landscapes, especially those containing bridges or wooded mountains are described as genitals. Castration may be presented by baldness, haircutting, loss of teeth and beheading. As a defense against castration one may see multiple forms of the penis (e.g., several guns) or an animal (e.g., lizard) whose tail, if pulled off, is regenerated by new growth. Also, symbols used in mythology and folklore may be used in symbol formation; the fish or snail substitutes for siblings or little children or pregnancy (unwanted sibling). Hollow objects (chest, boxes, containers, etc.) are used to symbolize female genitalia. Genitals are often represented by other parts of the body; the male by the hand or the foot; the female genital orifice by the mouth, the ear, or even the eye. Human secretion often are used interchangeable; mucus, tears, urine, semen. Motor activities (running, flying, falling, movement of vehicles, etc.) represent sexual impressions. In childhood, such actual movement is associated with the real experience of genital stimulation. Water is female; coming out of the water may represent parturition; jumping into the water may represent a wish to return to maternal comfort. Arnheim (1966) concludes:

Freud’s conception of symbols, derives, of course, from his interpretation of dreams. Carl Gustav Jung and other writers, such as Erich Fromm, have opposed his view and pointed out that symbols serve to reveal rather than to hide their referents.

We are beginning to understand that during sleep man reenters into fuller possession of a basic and most valuable capacity of human mind, which consists in representing abstract states of affairs by striking images. It is this capacity, badly impaired during our waking hours by Western culture, on which the artist also relies. Far from hiding their referent, artistic symbols give tangible appearance to ideas they represent. They revive and clarify the issues of human existence. (p. 219-220)

Art Of The Insane

Ernst Kris (1952) is perhaps the most prominent author from the Freudian School. He did not study creativity exclusively from the “unconscious perspective”. He stressed the importance of the primary process in the formal mechanism of creativity as a “regression in service to the ego”. Regression refers to the tendency of people to return, as a result of trauma, to more primitive mental states and for artists to embody these experiences into their work that resembles those of earlier periods in the history of art. Kris studied extensively the art of the insane and hypothesized that the “conflict free spheres of the ego” helped a delusional artist to create freely. With the aid of this dissociate function, the creative person has the ability to diverge the energy originally invested in primitive personal objects and can invest it in creative work.

Further, Kris detected a change of style in the work of psychotic artists. He speculated that during psychosis artistic ability can remain unimpaired and no big changes will occur. In other words, the creative activity is not part of the psychotic process. Another possibility can be that the artistic activity is interrupted and -without noticeable change- resumed after the person’s improvement. Another change can be witnessed in the change of style where the disorder manifest itself. Kris argued that even with the style changing, the connections with the artistic tendencies of the individual and his environment are preserved. Viewing the total work of the artist we feel the intactness. Vincent van Gogh would be a case in point as well the German sculptor Messerschmidt. Messerschmidt’s “Charakterkoepfe” are physiognomic studies and express various human facial phenomena (MacGregor, 1989). Despite his mental illness in later years he created a series of sixty-nine busts.

L’art brut, or “raw art” or the “ Art of Outsiders,” is referred to by McClaran (1994) as to the “Art of the Insane.” The anthology The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture examines unusual art - folk art, outsider art, art brut or what poet John Ashbery called “sick art.” It is art from people who work outside the cultivated art world, who express their art “in its pristine form, something unadulterated, something reinvented from scratch at all stages” - as Roger Cardinal writes in Toward an Outside Aesthetic.

Such artists can be found in mental hospitals or mountain villages; their common bond is that they have no art training. They include the late Columbus artist Elijah Pierce, whose work The Artist Outsider features.

Although the term outsider artist was not coined until 1970 - and its chief exponent, French artist Jean Dubuffet, did not start collecting art from insane asylums until the 1940s - The art form has its precedents.

Seventy years ago, in Ein Geisteskranker als Kuenstler (MacGregor, 1989), Swiss Psychiatrist Morgenthaler presented the copious art work of Adolf Woelfli.

If an architect chooses to pull an old house down in order to construct a better one in its place; and if another occasion a house is destroyed by an earthquake, the field of ruins which result can appear be exactly similar. Modern artist, most of whom are hyper intellectual, are overstated with traditional culture. They seek through systematic destruction of traditional forms to return to certain fundamental underlying elements. With Woelfli, however, due to a pathological process which destroyed his rationality, and other psychic functions, such fundamental elements were brought to light. These are raw and clumsy, but they are primordial too. In these works part of the powerful and fundamental artistic foundation lies uncovered, elements which certain modern artist, through their conscious demolition efforts, had been the first to search for.

Woelfli documented his experience during 35 years of psychiatric hospitalization in compulsive drawings, writings, collages, and paintings. He developed a system to survive further alienation, depersonalization and fragmentation.

Ebbinghaus (MacGregor, 1989) postulated that a certain force inside the patient leads to a structuring of the mental contents and of expression. He has described, under the rather unfortunate term “objectivity function,” certain psychological phenomena which organize and rule the contents of the mind, without which our consciousness would be nothing more than chaos ... It involves the functions of space perception, of time perception, of consciousness of similarity, of resemblance and difference, the perception of part and whole, of rhythm and number, of identity, and of movement and change.

Prinzhorn (1972), who was trained in art history and psychiatry in Germany, brought a new understanding to the phenomena “psychotic art”. His approach towards a collection of art by his patients was that one of an art critic, not a psychoanalyst. Prinzhorn’s contribution was to have forced the recognition that there is no psychopathology of art or expression and that man’s images, to the extent that they embody and communicate human reality, however strange or pathological that reality may be, belong firmly and without qualification to that sequence of unforgettable images to which we give the name art.

Nickalls (1995) points out that Prinzhorn’s theory was criticized in Freudian circles. He stressed the Jungian notion of the archetype and the collective unconscious. He believed that patients are in contact with the most profound truths even though they seem to be impaired psychologically. Like Jung, Prinzhorn accepts the notion of the unconscious but not as a conflicting theory but as an enabler of visionary powers. Prinzhorn debates the stereotypical belief of “Genius and Madman” and forewarned his audience.

Whether we call a person an artist or a madman matters little.

In this century the two terms have been curiously interchangeable. What is essential is that the creative freedom of both is maintained and protected, that within our society a way is kept open for those unique and courageous individuals who, shunning the surface and the light, seek, at the bidding of inner necessity, to descend into the darkness in search of themselves. (Prinzhorn, 1972, p. 318)

According to Professor Henry Walton (Nickalls, 1995), Professor emeritus of psychiatry at Edinburgh University, art is of the greatest importance in mental illness. However, he says, art therapy which encourages mentally ill people to become creative, is quite distinct from the creativity of artists when they become psychiatrically ill.

This is usually a devastating impairment as bipolar disease leads to the disruption in the creative process and for an artist in any sphere this is absolutely harrowing. They dread that their capacity to create won’t return. However, when they improve sufficiently to start being interested again, it is often immensely integrative. It appears to them as a path out of the abyss. What is so impressive in treating mental illness is the way the self reconstitutes itself. For an artist, the means of artistic expression is often a central pillar in the recovery of self. (p. 15)

ART THERAPY

Rollo May (1985) wrote that for much of this century, researchers had avoided the subject of creativity because they perceived it as “unscientific, mysterious, disturbing and too corruptive” for scientific training of graduate students. Today, researchers are focusing on the concept that creativity and healing, once fugitive and ubiquitous, are the marks of human nature, itself.

The pioneers in the field of art therapy, Kramer, Naumburg and followers Ulman, Rubin, Wallace, Robbins, Garlock and others realized that art therapy is process oriented. It makes no difference if one has ever sculpted, drawn or painted before. A client comes to art therapy not because he wants to create a beautiful piece of art. The art work is simply a means to developing a more harmonious inner life and creating the confidence for outer experiences.

The philosophy of art therapy is whatever we create is an extension of ourselves and that what we say about our art is, in a very real sense, a description of how we perceive ourselves and the world. The value of allowing the client to interpret his own work lies in providing a safe space in which self-expression can be attained at a pace that is comfortable for the client to absorb what is necessary.

During art therapy, the client gains experience using art media to express unconscious material and may demonstrate growth in both execution and content. This growth represents a strengthening of ego function through the acquisition of skill and may also encourage the development of more mature and less restrictive defense mechanisms.

Margret Naumburg (1973) states so eloquently:

... As soon as original art work is encouraged, instead of dependence on models and specific techniques, the focus of a patient’s art activity is modified. He will begin to draw on his own inner resources and this will inevitably lead to some expression of the conflicts within the personality. Such release, drawn from both the conscious and the unconscious level, may, in itself, have a distinctly therapeutic effect on the patient. (p. 50)

Renehan (1995) analyzed Beate Albrich, an art therapist from Germany who has been running clay, mask and color workshops in Prague since 1990. Her zest for life and art are infectious and unique. She employs the same art therapy techniques in her public workshops as she uses in her treatment of the mentally ill. The mountain, with its dark and light sides, represents the contradictions that exist in human beings, causing them to become depressed or stressed. In that sense, art is not the driving force behind Albrich’s workshops. Healing is. “Psychiatric art is fashionable now,” admits Albrich. But she says she doesn’t want to exploit the trend. “My work is not really about that.” “Brut,” the French word used internationally to describe this kind of art, is trendy these days. But what artists might call their own “unique perspective” is a biological reality - or nightmare - for the person who is genuinely mentally ill.

Every mind has a specific number of images that it receives through the eye, Albrich explains. A healthy mind will put these images together to form recognizable shapes. “In mentally ill,” she says, “these pictures fall apart.” “You cannot put the world together again - it has fallen to pieces.” This effectively generates a unique vision of the world - resulting in the distortive perspective many artists crave. Beate Albrich frequently cites Van Gogh as the most frequent example of this.

At the “Art Equal Life Gallery” in California, Jordan (1994) noted that the artwork from patients are freely displayed and selling the artwork is just a sideline. Far more important, therapists say, is the self-esteem the artists gain from seeing their work framed and displayed. The display, the say, can enhance the value of using art as therapy. And they appreciate the message the art conveys to the world outside. Through visits from school and civic groups, the gallery’s directors hope to demonstrate the productivity and talent of people whom society often shuns. “There’s a tremendous stigma that we have to just get rid of,” says Jack Cheney, director of the hospital’s art therapy program. “our prejudices have held us all bondage for centuries.” In some ways, the mentally ill have always had a place in the art world. Vincent van Gogh painted some of his finest pieces in the asylum at St. Remy. “ There’s really a major shim from the old couch approach to psychotherapy,” says Cheney, who started the program. “It’s much more giving the power to the patients to make those creative choices in their lives.”

Edith Kramer (1958) thoughtfully summarizes the healing quality of the creative process:

Art is a means of widening the range of human experiences by creating equivalents for such experiences. It is an area wherein experiences can be chosen, varied, repeated at will. In the creative act, conflict is experienced, resolved and integrated .... The arts throughout history have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual’s instinctual urges and the demands of society .... The process of sublimation constitutes the best demands of society ..... The process of sublimation constitutes the best way to deal with a basic human dilemma, but the conflicting demands of superego and id cannot be permanently reconciled ... In the artistic product conflict is formed and contained but only partly neutralized. The artist’s position epitomizes the precarious human situation: while his craft demands the greatest self-discipline and perseverance, he must maintain access the primitive impulses and fantasies that constitute the raw material for his creative work.

The art therapist makes creative experiences available to disturbed persons in the service of the total personality; he must use methods compatible with the inner laws of artistic creation .... His primary function is to assist the process of sublimation, an act of integration and synthesis which is performed by the ego, wherein the peculiar fusion between reality and fantasy, between the unconscious and the conscious, which we call art is reached. (p. 23)

PATHOGRAPHY

Tolstoy quoted by Wolff (1976) describes art as:

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movement, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling- this is the activity of art. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others, feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

The stronger the degree of infectiousness of art, the better the art is, Tolstoy maintains. And the fundamental source of infectiousness- the quality in the artist which enables him or her to spark a contagion of feeling in the audience- is not reason nor imaginative brilliance, nor metaphysical insight, nor extraordinary creativity, but simply sincerity. Honesty of feelings is directly apprehended and responded to by an artist’s audience. (p. 176)

So much has written about artists especially by the nineteenth century pathographers Lombroso, Nordau, Moebius and others. Hostility mounted toward writers creating analytical data and genius. Biographical efforts within art history prior to the discovery of the Freudian school were looked upon worthless. “Psychographic muckraking” was not appropriate for a psychologically unsophisticated audience.

Ernst Kris (MacGregor, 1989) undertook the brave endeavor to look at the “art brut” and came to the realization that the study of the unified whole must also include historical and social factors that play a no less important part in the development of the individual and the interpretation of his expressive behavior. Vincent van Gogh left over 700 letters revealing his life. Historyonics reveals the soul of van Gogh with the help of those letters. The life of Vincent van Gogh, the great Dutch artist, is the subject of “A Fire in the Soul, “ the current offering of historyonics Theatre Company.

In fashioning staged from primary historical documents, Kowarsky (1996) points out that Psycho historians have seldom worked with more compelling biographical material than the correspondence between van Gogh and his brother, Theo. The company has made the most of the opportunity with a production of great emotional power and intellectual substance.

Van Gogh’s disappointments in love, his troubled relationship with his parents, and his increasing mental disturbance all find a place in the script, but so do fascinating comments about his artistic goals and how they were affected by his religious fervor and his abiding sympathy for those who were least fortunate in society.

His letters, his nachlass, are taken very seriously by authors and cherished with much reference. Hermann Hesse(1974) wrote:

In the midst of a period of violence and brutal worship of strength, an artist becomes a favorite, indeed becomes a prophet and model, for a spiritual elite, an artist whose essence seems to be weakness, delicacy, devotion, and humility, who, however, turned his weakness into an impulse to greatness, turned his delicacy into strength, turned his psychic vulnerability and fear of life into a heroic asceticism. And this is the reason that letters and his personal life and his legend belong so very much to his work, because in his nature he is so very typical of what is unprotected, homeless, uprooted, threatened, yes suicidal in the spiritual man of our time. He prevails not because he was stronger but he was weaker than the average; it is the sick and threatened quality of his nature that so powerfully summoned up and strengthened the healing, incantative, magical forces in him. And so he has become a beloved and comforting image and model for the spiritual man and artist who does not withdraw from suffering, who does not flee from and renounce his own time and its fears, nor his own weaknesses and dangers, but through them, a sufferer, achieves his faith, his ability to live, his victory. (p. 341)

The Spiritual Universe: Plato and Van Gogh

Plato’s Seventh Book of the “Republic” (1974) begins with an unforgettable image, the parable of the prisoners in the cave, whose life among the shadows mirrors the life of the ordinary man on earth. The painful ascent to the sunlight illustrates the path to philosophic knowledge.

Temple (1990) felt that Plato’s idea of truth, goodness and beauty as equivalent concepts representing the highest ideal can be applied to help us assess the quality of artwork. If the universe created by God has order, proportion, harmony and balance, and if these are the products of truth, goodness and beauty, then all these qualities must be found in the works of art that celebrate God’s creation. Such works of art will manifest beauty, as well as goodness and truth, because they are themselves part of that creative process and conform to its laws.

Vincent carried the spiritual universe within him. Feaver (1990) states that Vincent wrote to his brother: “To paint well, one must have the gospel in one’s heart.” As one son of Pastor Theodorus van Gogh to another, he had no need to stress the importance of the sermon, the God-given opportunity to berate, explain, inspire. “When I was standing in the pulpit, I felt like somebody who, emerging from a dark cave below ground, returns to the light of day.”

The following paintings will show how Vincent’s life reflects much of Plato’s wisdom. His pictorial legacy leaves us with the notion of a cave dweller, someone who comes into the light, with the sunlight filling his eyes. He lived in the mines of the Borinage and took the road less traveled to see the objects in the sky, the light of the stars, the moon and the sun. They provide the seasons and the years and govern everything in the visible world.

Vincent turned the eye from darkness to light. “Going down a mine is a dreadful thing; in a kind of basket or cage, like a bucket into a well, but a deep well of 1500 to 2000 feet, so that if one looks up from the bottom, the daylight is about the size of a star in the sky.” (H.R.Graetz, 1963, p.18)

En Route Description

The self-portraying picture “En Route” casts the wanderer towards the light. Graetz (1963) writes that the lamp symbolizes the light of love burning in him that he longed to bring to man. In his letter to Theo, Vincent wrote: “Love is something eternal. It may change in aspect but not in essence. And there is the same difference between one who loves and the same person before he loves as between a lighted lamp and one that does not burn. The lamp was there all right, and it was a good lamp, but now it also gives light and exercises its real function. This love is the light of the world in which we live, that is the light of man.” Interpretation

“En Route” could be explained using the House-Tree-Person projective test. This model helps a clinician gather data regarding an individual’s degree of personality integration, maturity, and efficiency. ( Oster and Gould, 1987). The house tends to elicit connections regarding the examinee’s home and the interpersonal dynamics within the family setting. The chimney, door, windows, gutters, roof, shutters and walkways present clues to a diagnostic eye. Vincent’s drawing of his small house indicate rejection from his home. The house seems to be unfinished and its bird eye view suggest the unhappiness in his relationships and of his home situation and a desire to escape (Oster & Gould, 1987).

The tree is believed to be associated with one’s life role and one’s capabilities in obtaining rewards from the environment. Tree drawings have been considered especially rich in providing insights concerning “life content,” that is, displaying accurate biographical situations and/or offering personal characteristics of the person being examined.

The tree seems to reflect long standing, unconscious feelings towards the self. These feelings tend to reside at a more basic, primitive level. The trunk signifies basic ego strength, the ground line stability, personality and integrity. Branches are connected to receiving satisfaction from the environment.

The tree in Vincent’s drawing is extremely large compared to other subject matter. The tree suggests aggressive tendencies. The scars, or knotholes on the left side are associated with trauma, e.g., accident, illness, rape (time determination in relation to length of tree). In his teens, Vincent suffered trauma while attending boarding school and experienced a hard time in adjusting to new turbulent environments which has been projected.

Oster and Gould (1987) noted that the ground line of the tree is heavily shaded and project a great deal of anxiety and repressed emotions. The heavily shaded trunk and branches reflect his hostile defenses and aggressive behaviors.

“ And now I am on the road...,” was his last letter (136) from the Borinage before leaving for Brussels. He had taken the decisive turn on the road of his life, to follow his calling as an artist. The trials of his earlier occupations as a shop assistant, art dealer, teacher, seminarian, and lay preacher were over, all ending in failure. (Letter 136)

Oster and Gouls (1987) state that on a Person Projective Drawing, the person stimulates conscious feelings regarding bodily image and self-concept, both physically and psychologically. Vincent’s drawing shows one hand held behind his back suggesting his interpersonal reluctance and wanting to control anger. His exaggeration on his long, clumsy feet project a striving for security. The expression on his face is angry, the hat, suggesting security, is covering half of his face. Long shadows projecting fear are casted on the road. His side way glance projects suspicion and paranoid tendencies.

According to Graetz (1963), the man, the light, the road, the tree, and the house are ever-recurrent symbols in Vincent’s art, from this early little drawing until his last canvasses in the summer of 1890, when he ended his life in the fields at Auvers.

Potato Eaters

Description

Vincent painted his first big work of art after his father’s death in April 1885. He called it the “Potato Eaters” and dedicated it to the peasant life. “In painting these peasants, I thought of what had been said of those of Millet, that they seem to have been painted with the very soil they sow.” (Letter 402).

Walther (1987). revealed solidarity and poverty in the sparse meal, which the five emaciated, hard working figures have to share. Potatoes and coffee are passed naturally around the table, and the unselfish communal feeling reaches almost religious, tranquil pathos. Cooper (1978) noted that the dark colors suggest his own depressive mood, the lack of understanding in his parents home and the glimpse of light and escape of the cave. In Christianity, the color brown symbolizes a spiritual death, death to the world, renunciation, penitence and degradation.

Interpretation

Cooper (1978) stated that the barren room of the potato eaters appears stable-like and the only illumination is an oil burning lamp. The light beacons a manifestation of divinity, cosmic creation and the universal principle in manifestation. The radiance of light symbolizes new life from divinity, the power of dispelling evil and the forces of darkness. Illumination conveys, or is the result of, supernatural powers.

Goldwater (1979) writes that Vincent uses the light, first as an uncertain wanderer into a world of discovery, than using the force of light, to express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance.

The clock in the background indicates twenty-five minutes to twelve, summed up, thirty-seven, the age of Vincent’s suicide. (Humberto Nagara, 1967)

The faces of the peasants seem lonely and the bodies isolated. Vincent outlined heavily the walls to further the isolation, his isolation. “Isolation is a kind of prison and I feel more at ease with peasants and weavers who do not even know the word isolation than with educated people.” (Letters 3 47 and 3 51)

Collins (1989) writes that Donald Kuspit suggests that what makes van Gogh’s art important is not its “banally illustrative” subject matter, but its unprecedented tactility. Van Gogh’s combination of mountainous heaps of impasto and strenuously hepatic line transforms seeing into “a sort of intense touching.”

Lubin (1987) states that Vincent once exclaimed, “How beautiful the mud is, and the withering grass.” Vincent put himself into its gnarled ugly peasants, the “grimy cottage,” the unsmooth brushstrokes, the muddy colors, and the energetic rapid execution. For others to accept its ugliness as beautiful was to accept him. When van Rappard criticized the painting on aesthetic grounds, he was in effect, reminding Vincent that he was ugly and repulsive.

Vincent learned to recognize and to render what Joyce has called the “radiance” of all things, as an epiphany or showing forth their truth (Campbell, 1988).

The Yellow House

Description

The Yellow House was painted by Vincent in September 1888 in Arles. The “House of Friends”, in which Vincent hoped to establish a community of suffering artists. Gauguin would be selected by Vincent to be on the summit of the hierarchy. He lived only a short time in the house when he suffered his first nervous breakdown. Through the windows he heard the .shouting voices of the citizen of Arles. They persecuted him and wanted him out of the neighborhood since they perceived his behavior and appearance as threatening. Vincent frequently painted during the night with candles fastened on his head to illuminate the canvas.

Walther (1987) writes about Vincent’s enthusiasm: “My house here is painted butter yellow on the outside and has solid green window shutters; it is located directly in a square with a green park full of plain trees, oleanders and acacias. And inside, all the walls are painted white and the floor is tiled in red. Yet the most striking thing is the glaring blue sky. Inside the house I can really live and breathe and think and paint.

Interpretation

The painting is dominated by strong yellows, with Vincent’s house standing out in the center with a strong, intense color. The glaring yellow almost hurts the eye in its tremendous contrast to the deep blue of the front door and windows. A man is standing between the dividing line. Could it be Vincent himself, divided in parts?

Collins (1989) stated that John Gedo, Donald Kuspit, Albert Lubin, Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Gilbert Rose and Aaron Sheon studied Van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s troubled psyches to determine whether psychobiography can analyze formal issues as well as subject matter. The panel dwelled at length on the homoerotic aspects of van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s relationship. Gauguin was a strong father figure in Vincent’s subconscious, yet he believed that he could live peacefully with Gauguin under one roof. Vincent grew nervous when Gauguin wanted his companionship and feverishly he started to paint. He planned for the arrival of Gauguin and prepared a room specific for the newcomer. “If someone comes visiting, he should receive the prettiest room and I will decorate it like a ladies room ... big pictures with twelve or fourteen sunflowers and a cozy bed.” ( van Gogh, letter 534)

Graetz (1963) noted that this room was more suited for a lady than the macho Gauguin. Vincent’s bisexual conflict, which he projected on canvas by splitting himself in half, suggesting passive-feminine fantasies, are fully observed by painting the yellow house. Farther, we notice a man walking/standing alone in the street and at some distance from him are women. The women, one with child add again to the underlying ambivalence to Vincent’s identity. The man seems to be isolated, cut in half and separated from the others. His solitude is further outlined by a lamppost opposite the man. The gravity of his inner struggle is intimidated by another feature in this painting. A train passes over a viaduct in the background; its movement is suggested by puffs of light smoke. The train infers distance in contrast to the nearness of the house-so close to Vincent’s heart and in the center of his canvas. He had referred to a train on an earlier occasion when he had raised the question with Theo whether life was entirely visible to us or if we saw only one hemisphere before death. He had then compared life to a one-way journey on a train and continued: “If we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star.”

Furth (1988) pointed out that Jolles introduced a paper-division theory whereby one divides the paper in halves. Horizontally divided, the upper half strives strongly although the goal is unattainable. Further the artist’s drawing mostly in the upper part seeks gratification in fantasy, keeping aloof and is relatively inaccessible. The lower creation on canvas could be considered as insecure and inadequate. The individual leans to depression.

In analyzing Vincent’s House in Arles, one can read the forewarning of the Wheat Field with Crows which he painted shortly before committing suicide.

Vincent’s Chair with Pipe and Gauguin’s Chair with Books and Candle

Description

Shortly before Christmas, 1888, and his razor attack on Gauguin, Vincent painted his and Gauguin’s empty chairs. Vincent saw his entire dream shatter and felt his utopia of an artist commune, which he attempted with Gauguin, finally disappear.

After he worked on these canvases in the middle of December 1888, he described them to Theo: “In the meantime I can at all events tell you that the last two studies are quite curious. Canvases of 30, a chair of wood and rush all yellow on red tiles against a wall. Then Gauguin’s armchair, red and green, effect of night, wall and floor also red and green, on the seat two novels and a candle.” (Letter 571)

Interpretation

Graetz (1963) perceives that Gauguin’s chair is shaped in an easy, curved movement and painted mainly brown-red and violet. It stands on a fancy carpet glimmering in lively colors with red and yellow against a green background. The elegant armchair is appropriate for Gauguin’s room, the lady’s boudoir.

Lubin (1972) suggested that van Gogh’s Gauguin Chair, with its erect candle sitting on the feminine curvilinear chair of a prior painting “La Berceuse”, might express more than van Gogh’s desire for Gauguin as a “phallic mother.” Van Gogh, with his characteristic intuitiveness, may have made a psychologically astute portrait of Gauguin.

Collins (1989) sees that Gauguin’s Chair not only identifies Gauguin’s self-defeating Don Juanism, the phallic candle pierces precariously on the seat, but also it’s bisexual underpinnings. Further we notice the large yellow light shining on the wall. H. R. Graetz (1963) suggests that the round shape is like a sun, his symbol of love, which in its conspicuous size gives a more warm light than the small flame of the candle. This full light, in contrast to the flickering candle in Gauguin’s place, might also express Vincent’s insight into the inner disparity of their relationship. The choice of red and green reminds one of the painting “All Night Cafe” which documented darkness and lost hope, where one according to Vincent, can go mad.

On Vincent’s chair lay a pipe and some tobacco. The pale yellow chair suggest loneliness in a particular impressive way. It is painted in Vincent’s color of love but stands in the middle of the room, without touching anything. It was in connection with Gauguin coming that he had written to Theo: “One always loses when one is isolated” (Letter 493) and in a letter from Nuen “...isolation is like a prison” (Letter 351)

Vaccaro (1973) sees Vincent’s addition of a coffin-like chest to his chair as sexual ambiguity.

Graetz (1963) perceives in “Vincent’s Chair” that there is still hope, expressed by the onion sprouting from the box, his cage of imprisonment.

The empty chairs are symbolically for Vincent’s death, which he describes through various episodes and letters. The empty chair from Fildes left a great impression upon him. He was so impressed that he frequently used part of his limited free time to locate a reproduction of it. This unsuccessful search left him dejected. In one of his letters to Theo from Den Haag, Vincent’s strong interest for this drawing indicated a symbolic language for death. Vincent writes how Fildes Dickens searched to illustrate his latest work “Edwin Drood”. Dickens was very sick and Fildes entered his room on the day he died and witnessed the empty chair. Further, Vincent writes to his brother: “There are many empty chairs, and many others will be empty and soon or later there will be instead of Herkomet, Luke, Fildes, Frank Holl, William Smalll and others only empty chairs.” Letter 252)

Self Portrait With Bandaged Ear

Description

The Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear was painted by Vincent in January 1889. Gauguin, the murderer of hope and trust, left Vincent after being attacked by a razorblade.

Danto (1984) noted that on December 23, 1888, van Gogh cropped his famous ear. Eleven days later, on January 3, Nietzsche flung himself, weeping, across the neck of a horse being flogged. Arthur Danto, observed that a most advanced painter and a most advanced philosopher in Europe should have gone into madness at the same moment. But the parallels are worth considering. Both men were northerners, drawn south to “the orange-gold land where lemons flower” by the promise of a healing warmth and light. Both were medical cranks, watchers over their wasting bodies, complainers of surprisingly congruent symptoms. Passages in their letters could be translations of each other in their litany of physical pain and malfunction-eyes, brain, stomach, bowels. Each sought a kind of domestic love so consistently denied them that one must infer a deep sexual unattractiveness. So both resorted to prostitutes, the grues et grenouilles (“cranes and frogs”) that figure as rebuses in one of Vincent’s uncharacteristic visual puns—to whom one supposes the fateful pathogens of their breakdowns were due. In both cases, insanity climaxed a decade of intense, transformative activity, during which neither was appreciated outside a circle of negligible diameter.

Cabanne (1963) noted when Vincent was approaching his thirty-sixth birthday he painted his self-portrait. He portrayed himself with emaciating features, hollow cheeks, expressionless eyes, and an air of absent-mindedness. A man who is resigned, who has seen life and whose hopes are at an end.. The right eye is starring hard at the spectator (that is the painter himself), piercing him, scrutinizing him, while the other remains apathetic, lifeless, as though a shadow already veiled its brilliance.

Interpretation

Graetz (1963) noted that viewers are at once caught by the gripping sadness of his eyes. The distance between seems narrower than usual, as if strain and pain had drawn them closer together, thus increasing the expression of suffering that his grave straight look transmits to us. Contrasted by the dark blue fur cap which is deep-set on his forehead, and the white bandage over the wound, the face is very pale. The mouth firmly holding a pipe between the lips show tense determination. The background is divided in two, the lower part red and the upper orange; the line of the horizon is exactly at the level of his eyes. The tension in this portrait is greatly increased by the extraordinary rendering of Vincent’s breath and of the smoke from his pipe.

Danto (1984) suggests: “Wherever Vincent is, he is cold, for he is wearing his heavy green coat, and the yellow smoke from his emblematic pipe spirals upward, past the maroon band behind him, into the ocher space above, where it disappears in the strokes of lemon yellow which press down like a steady rain of paint.

Graetz (1963) pointed out that the spiral symbol appears in this painting for the first time. From now on it is often repeated in curls or waves, most strikingly in the St. Remy landscapes. The spirals have one more function than to connect the line of the horizon, they link the lower and upper parts of the divided background. They symbolize his spiritual force, and their uniting movement signifies the beginning of a tenacious battle against the disintegration which the divided background conveys.

Elgar (1966) said, that it is obvious that so masterly a painting could not have been executed by anyone whose mind was at all unbalanced. The firmness of the drawing, strong color and extreme simplicity of handling combine to give an impression of vigor and serenity at which Vincent had no doubt aimed. The effect would have been fully obtained if it had not been for the disturbing stare of the intensely blue eyes, which seem to miss nothing and yet see nothing.

Mark Stevens (1984) perceived Van Gogh to express human suffering by means of red and green colors and that much is made of his madness. Certainly, his unsteady mind and solitary, impoverished life in Arles opened his eyes to new ideas. “Madness is salutary,” Vincent wrote, “in that one becomes less exclusive... “What Stirring in van Gogh, however, is not madness but sanity in the face of madness.

Lubin (1972) wrote that the Dutch psychoanalyst A. J. Westerman Holstijn, in the first comprehensive psychoanalytic study of van Gogh, pointed out two frustrations that contributed to the self-mutilation: the engagement of Theo and the failure of the relationship with Gauguin. This double frustration incited aggressive impulses within van Gogh which, having been unsuccessfully directed toward Gauguin, were then turned upon himself. Westerman Holstijn may have been the first to suggest that Vincent’s ear was a phallic symbol and that the act represented castration.

Frank Elgar (1958) asserted, “There is no need to invoke complex scientific ideas for an explanation of this tragedy, we have to imagine Vincent’s state of mind when Gauguin announced his departure. In this fresh defeat he had the appalling sensation of having been outlawed by that very humanity with which he had always longed, from childhood, to be united. This inferiority complex was reinforced by one of guilt. He punishes his guilt by severing his own ear. Next, in a Christian spirit of self-sacrifice he carries this fragment of himself, his own living flesh, to the most fallen of human beings.”

Two or three kilometers outside the tree-shaded Provence town of St Remy, at the foot of a mountain chain of bare and twisted rock, lies a complex of buildings known as St-Paul-de-Mausole. Although they are fine examples of 12^th century Romanesque architecture, the church and cloister here are rarely visited by tourists. A silence hangs heavily in the air at St Paul, and the presence of a high stone wall that completely surrounds the site adds to the atmosphere of restraint. Originally an Augustinian priory, St-Paul-de-Mausole is today an insane asylum, and its wall is intended to keep people in rather than out.

Irises

Description

Walther (1987) pointed out that one of his first paintings done in the hospital of St. Remy is “Irises”. He came across this motif of voluptuous irises on his way to Dr. Paul Gachet’s flat. The painting is crammed with the ripe, moist excess of nature. The deep blue of the finely drawn iris buds contrast sharply with the bold green of the leaves with their lancet tongue-like form, which divide the flowers into horizontal rows.

Interpretation

Furth (1988) referred to the quadrant theory that the lower left part of the painting is his unconscious while the upper half of the picture is always the conscious. . Did Vincent remind us subconsciously that the well-defined root system nourishes a flower, tree or bush and the visible part, or conscious is sprouting from it?

Jung (1964), who describes himself as a “splinter of the infinite deity”, said: “Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground last only a single summer. Then it withers away-an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilization, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”

Graetz (1963) writes that roots are important to Vincent. The connective web of root formation is projected in Vincent’s letter to Theo when he was painting the Irises: “The best for me would certainly be not to remain alone,” and “It is a great consolation for me to know that you not longer live alone and ...yes , also to me it seems there is a very long stretch of time between day when we took our leave at the station and these days now...”

James Smith Pierce (1991) wrote that the iris, which was known in Latin as “gladiolus” or “sword-lily” because of its sword-shaped leaves, appears in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century paintings of the Virgin and Child as a disguised symbol foreshadowing the grief of Mary at the Crucifixion of Christ. The iris replaced the more obvious symbol of the sword which was formerly shown stuck in Mary’s heart in allusion to old Simeon’s prophecy to Mary during the presentation in the temple: “Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also.”

For more than a year, van Gogh was voluntary committed in the asylum of St. Paul-de-Mausaule in St.Remy. While there, he suffered attacks that he described as “abominable,” “horrible” and “terrible.” He attempted to poison himself by eating paint and drinking kerosene. Within the protective walls of this institution, his work thrived. Van Gogh once wrote to Theo:

”Really we can speak only speak through our paintings. In my own paintings I am risking my life and half my reason has been lost in it.” (Letters 14 & 15)

Michael Brenson (1986) states that Mr. Pickvance, the curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art believes that Vincent’s mental state did not affect directly his work. His paintings during the St. Remy period are neither graphs of his so-called madness nor primarily indicators of his mental state. Between his breakdowns at the asylum he had long periods of absolute lucidity, when he was completely master of himself and his art.

Nicholas Woodsworth (1987) argued that during the moments of lucidity Vincent painted methodical, objective and highly analytical. His vision rests solidly on a detailed examination of the world around him. In terms of his painting, his struggle was less with himself than what he called his “hand-to-hand-struggle with nature.

Starry Night

Description

Graetz (1963) writes that after six weeks in St. Remy Vincent reported to Theo about a new study of a starry sky. “Starry Night” is the canvas which Vincent had always dreamed of doing. Reflecting back to the “Self-Portrait with the Bandaged Ear” one notices the ensuing development of the waves and spirals in his work. These symbols of Vincent’s rise into his spiritual sphere reach a high point in the “Starry Night.” Here his soul reigns on its own domain and the life in the sky becomes real life. The night sky is turned into bright light, while the village down below is like a faint reminiscence of the church spires and houses in the old Dutch villages.

Vincent rose towards the metaphysical, where a reign of universal brotherhood and love reigns. Friedrich Schiller in his words “Ode to Joy” and Beethoven’s music depict Vincent’s feeling of total joy and freedom of the restraint from a society who did not understand him.

Graetz (1963) stated in a letter to his sister, Vincent wrote about his impressions of the poet Walt Whitman: “He sees in the future, and even in the present, a world of health, of carnal love, great and frank-of friendship-of work with the great starry firmament, something which in short one can only call God and eternity placed again above the world. It makes you smile at first, it is so candid and pure; it makes you reflect for the same reason.”

Interpretation

Lauren Soth (1986) argues that the Starry Night is a religious picture, a sublimation of impulses that, since Van Gogh’s loss of faith in established religion, could not find their outlet in conventional Christian imagery. She believes that his painting is related to the agony in the Garden, the biblical episode that had a profound, lifelong significance for him. When Vincent went to the Borinage, he took with him a book containing psalms set to music and other hymns. In the 634 pages of that book, Van Gogh made only one drawing, really just a doodle, but the doodle is in the shape of a crescent moon.

Oster and Gould (1987) say that the “scribble” or “doodle” is described by Florence Cane as a valuable tool to express portions of the inner self that one is reluctant to share.

Landgarten and Lubbers (1981) state that Rollo May describes freedom and its resulting anxiety as the pause that breaks into cause and effect-a phenomenology of total self, not just intellect. With this freedom we construct our world-that the experience, the experience of freedom, is the experience of consciousness. The experience of consciousness is an infinite backward movement illuminating the world and our freedom to create our own world. An example of the freedom to constitute our life in the art therapy process is demonstrated when a person makes a scribble with one color and than with other colors brings out the images found therein. The scribble and the art media are symbolic of the amorphous, monochromatic objects which we become aware of some time after conception.

Bequest (1986) noted that the seed of the Starry Night was planted in the caves of the Borinage and executed through the cell windows of the asylum. Beneath his actual cell was an enclosed field, but in the painting Van Gogh depicted cypresses and a village. When he painted the Starry Night, the crescent moon was inconspicuous and therefore did not come from his immediate observation. It apparently came from Van Gogh’s unconscious of Jules Breton’s work, which he deeply admired.

Goldwater sourced that Meyer Shapiro said, “Van Gogh put a pantheistic rapture...the exultation of his desire for mystical union and release, but no theology, no allegories of the divine. The flowing rhythms have a different depth and force of emotion: they are an anxiety projected upon, and apparently embodied in, nature itself.”

Interpretation

Rudolf Arnheim (1966) perceived that Vincent painted the stars in Taoistic symbols. Arnheim explains about the polarity of yin and yang found in Tao’s theory. Yin and yang are two antagonistic, balanced principles, whose interaction constitutes the duality within the unity, the indivisible, supreme One. The yang is the male principle; it stands for light, warmth, and dryness. The yin is female and represents darkness, cold, moisture. By being opposites, the two principles generate the phenomena of Nature. They are not separate from each other nor do they simply add up to the whole. They represent the constant interaction of everything within the One. When there is harmony, the Way (Tao) of Nature pervades all existence. But harmony is not given automatically. Conduct requires active initiative, with the Way of Nature or violating it.

Did Vincent cultivate Tao’s theory when he painted with obsessive, directional strokes his starry night?

“But when one fells the need for something infinite, for something in which one can see God, one does not need to look far; it seems to me I saw something deeper, more infinite, more external than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a small child when it wakes in the morning, crows or laughs because it sees the sun shining into its little crib. If there is a rayon D’en haut (ray from above) perhaps one can find it there.” (Letter 242)

Rosa (1990) theorizes that blue was his color for the infinite and added orange in the bulging sun/moon image and distributed among the stars in small quantities. They vibrate because the combination of complimentary colors project its own tension as explained by the Law of Simultaneous contrast. The trusting shape of the cypress is a mass of curving brushstrokes in deep green, interspersed with black and outlined in deep-brownish red, the red and green forming yet another pair of complementary colors. The tree is cut off the bottom, a truncated pyramid. The tree is shown not anchored at all in the earth, but completed at the top in the vault of heavens.

The cosmic imagery of “The Starry Night”, in which van Gogh seems at the same time to be charting and riding the chariots of the gods leaves us with a ghostly feeling that the weary pilgrim, Vincent, follows his destiny.

Graetz (1963) noted that yellow lights are shining from the houses, but not from the church. When he studied in Amsterdam he had written to Theo: “I think the sun never shines more beautifully than in a parsonage or in a church-and the light in the little Sunday school room in Barndesteeg is only small, but let me keep it burning.”

Could it be that Vincent’s journey is coming to an end?

Wheat Field With Crows

Description

Van Gogh spent the last two months of his life in Auvers, 20 miles due north of Paris, where Cézanne and Daubigny, two artists he admired, had once lived. He wanted to be near his brother Theo, who was seeking to establish himself as an independent art dealer in Paris. He also felt some nostalgia for the north.

Monroe (1991) describes how his world of symbolic relationships seem to crumble as his sister-in-law was unable to nurse her baby, named after Vincent. He echoed the way he described his mother once in the past following the death of his father, “I see no future at all and I’m in a mood of almost too much calmness,” in an unfinished letter to his brother which Vincent kept for four days-until the day he shot himself.

Graetz (1963) alludes that the relative crisis does not seem to have meant another attack of his illness. But during those four days and nights he must have struggled with his intention of suicide which he hints by “disaster ... that is where we are” and by the underlined sentence: “Before there will be a chance of talking over matters with a quieter head, it will probably take a long time.” And yet, he called the crisis only relative, because dying was perhaps less difficult than living as he repeatedly asserted.

Further Vincent states in his unfinished letter: “And truly, we can only make our paintings speak.” (Letter 652)

Interpretation

Cabanne (1961) felt that The Wheat Field with Crows suggest that everything is about to be crushed, wiped out, in a cataclysm which will sweep earth and sky into one torrent shot with gold. Here, art and psychosis are inseparable, the movement of the corn and that of the crows oppose and contradict each other, rising in one direction, sinking in the other, creating the dual rhythm of the painter’s psychopathic manifestation.

Crows Over the Wheat Field is painted by Vincent on a double-square canvas, could this new style of painting suggest the burial plot for the brothers van Gogh?

Walther (1987) speculated that Vincent clearly echoed his mood in this painting. He attempted to convey his sadness and extreme loneliness by using the wider format which opens up into three separating ways at the front. The observer is unsettled by not knowing where both the horizon and the path end, in the field or somewhere off the edge of the painting. The normal structural perspective of wide open fields is turned upside down - its lines of alignment run from the horizon to meet in the front of the painting. The space presented here has no perceptual center to it any more. The blue sky and the yellow fields push forcibly away from one another, and flock of crows crosses the boundaries to the uncertain forefront.

Elgar (1966) asserted that a great poet, also on the threshold of madness, had attached a poignant significance to the crows, expressed in the ‘Nevermore,’ of Poe’s “The Raven.” In Vincent’s painting, crows fly across corn tinged with red towards a lowering sky, inscribing it with omens of coming disaster.

The crows, those ultimate little black figures, swoop and swoop again over the flattened corn. The pathos of Theo dying only five months after Vincent and the reunion of the bothers in the cemetery at Auvers conclude what has become the greatest story ever told of the relationship of artist and dealer.

Analysis

Arnheim (1966) stated that the social scientist Menninger wrote extensively as a clinician on the social implication of suicide. In part, he expanded upon the developmental aspects of Freud’s concept of self-destructive behavior as symptomatic of the two instinctual drives, Eros and Thantos. Basic polarities of young/old and destruction/creation, masculine/feminine and attachment and separation can be seen as the underlying conflicting pattern or design of a person’s “life structure” at a given time.

Vincent’s letters are an act of self-revelation. Comparable to that of the psychoanalytical patient on the couch, Vincent described his feelings freely to his brother, Theo. The intensity of emotions, usually painful, depressing, frightening or rageful and often ecstatic give us a clue of the battling forces within him.

Anxiety Depression

I identified a number of possible psychological precipitating events. Monroe (1991) pointed out that Vincent had a low threshold of tolerating unusual stressors and the lack of being independent e.g. the anxiety of losing Theo’s support due to his impending marriage, the sexual dominance-submisssion conflict with Gauguin, and the impact of heavy drinking and poor diet made him more vulnerable to excessive neuronal discharges. When an individual repeatedly fails to achieve adaptional ens, there is often extreme uncertainty and doubt as to the validity of his or her goals and means of achieving them. His or her identity is strongly threatened.

Jamison Redfield (1993) suggests that the evidence includes the nature of van Gogh’s psychiatric symptoms (extreme mood changes, including long periods of depression and extended episodes of highly active, volatile and exited states, altered sleep patterns, hyper religiosity, extreme irritability, visual and auditory hallucinations, violence, agitation and alcohol abuse), the age of onset of his symptoms (late adolescence, early twenties), his pre morbid personality, the cyclic nature of his attacks, which were interspersed with long periods of highly lucid functioning, the lack of intellectual deterioration over time, the increasing severity of his mood swings, the seasonal exacerbation’s in his symptoms, and his quite remarkable family history of suicide and psychiatric illness as explained with the charts in the next two pages.

Characteristics of art in bipolar depression have not been studied systematically. Descriptions in the literature are generally congruent with the disorganized hyperactivity of manic behavior. Content described includes sexual symbols (Zimmermann and Garfinkle, 1942), and euphoric themes (Enachescu, 1971). Style is described as having wild, vivid, or hot colors (Dax, 1953; Enachescu, 1971; Plokker, 1965; Reitman, 1954) as well as a lack of color variety (Dax, 1953). Other stylistic characteristics are deterioration in composition (Plokker, 1965), carelessness (Dax, 1953), distorted lines (Reitman, 1954), scant detail and excitement (Zimmerman and Garfinkle, 1942), and indication of activity (Schube and Cowell, 1939).

Vincent’s art exuded depression and mania. During the manic depressive stage he was able to paint 70 canvases in 70 days. He made those statements as “ideas for my work are coming to me in swarms” (Letter 535) or “Continual fever to work” (Letter 474), or “an extraordinary feverish energy” (Letter 544A), or, “...terrible lucidity...” (Letter 543), and finally “...the pictures come to me as in a dream” (Letter 543)

Ferguson (1973) noted in regard to the perception of color, such comments from manics are made as, “it was as if we were surrounded by a golden glow”; “I emerged alone in the radiant white light”; “it began to glow a dull purple which turned to a deep cherry and the heat of it was overwhelming”; “colors seemed to flow”; colors seemed to hold great and uncanny significance”; “fields had a kind of luminescence”; “whirling colors into color, angle into angle”; there was no glow in them but only revolution.”

Art Therapy View

In looking for the artist’s personality in his work, there is always a human difficulty to be reckoned with. Vincent created from an inner urge and expressed his most intimate feelings in color, composition, line and structure. Colors signified the breath of life, which grants all things, the line as a principal movement, as the dynamics of life and as indestructible energy; the composition as a place of feelings for his view of the world. Fulfillment and loneliness, desire and doubt, love and destruction, devotion and flight from reality, closeness and distance, duration and transitoriness are the themes that sought consolation but whose love was not returned. Vincent’s creative solution searched and dealt with the feelings of abandonment and engulfment. He struggled and endured anxiety, since creative efforts usually have the potential of failing, of being critiqued unfavorable, and even of being rejected.

Vincent’s pictorial themes carry the “Leitmotif’, his struggle for love. Step by step the paintings show an inner connection with the necessary course of his life. Vincent “free-associated” his emotions on canvas and chose the road from darkness to illumination, the road of extreme suffering to enlightenment. As he stated that art wells up from a deeper source of our soul, he was able to feel the feeling of the less fortunate and downtrodden and expressed the human passion feverishly on canvas. His symbols portrayed an inner situation, sometimes they were pleasant or frustrating but they substantiated the unity between his art and life.

Masterson (1988) states that many artists with the severe disorders of the self are fortunate to have the talent that produces the urge to draw upon their creativity, thereby finding and establishing a segment of the real self that allows them to adapt to life more successfully than they probably would have without that talent. In effect, they ameliorate the depression and strengthen the real self-even though it remains impaired-through creative expression, which unlocks other impaired capacities, such as self-esteem and self-activation. Although these links are fragile, they can rescue Many artists with severe the artist from the typical tragedies that result from disorder. Creativity thus becomes the primary path in the artist’s quest for the real self.

Vincent’s physical and psychological torments are over, but his art lives and keeps on expressing his inner truth.

Joseph Campbell (1986) believed that art is spiritual in nature. Creative discoveries made by the artists represent universal truths. The “proper” artist, through his inspiration, functions as a true seer and prophet.

In Touchtones (1986), Albert Einstein said, “The most important function of art and science is to awaken the cosmic religious feeling and keep it alive.” Vincent used his creative efforts to overcome his helplessness. For him art was a means of gaining control, an anchor to be grounded, as well as a means of expressing emotions. He gained a sense of accomplishment and mastery by free-association his feelings on canvas as well into the written word of over 700 letters. The great variety of pictures demonstrate what he subconsciously longed for. Because of his primary concern with interpersonal relationships and the fear of not fulfilling his goals, Vincent became a dramatist on canvas. Freely, he retreated from the competitive world and pursued his inner calling to become a pilgrim with a special quest.

Nature safeguarded him from the harsh demands of society and gleefully he went on the lonely road, so very well depicted in the first painting. He came in touch with his own uniqueness as an individual and learned to know his idiosyncrasies and mental anguish. He questioned many times about his identity but found only solace in the spiritual world. His struggle to individuate himself, to become whole was on ongoing process, because of financial and emotional support of Theo.

Antony Storr (1988) advocates that when outer happenings and inner experience interact with one another; which is why seeing the perfect balance of colors and masses in a painting; or hearing the integration of opposing themes in a piece of music gives the observer or the listener the marvelous experience of a new unity as it were within his own psyche.

Storr (1988) refers to Abraham Maslow, who has written about peak experiences, believes that such experiences are a sign of psychic health; an attribute of the self-actualizing person: “The creative person, in the inspirational phase of the creative furor, loses his past and his future and lives only in the moment. He is all there, totally immersed, fascinated and absorbed in the present, in the current situation, in the here-now, with the matter-in-hand ... This ability to become lost in the present seems to be a sine qua non for creativeness of any kind. But also certain prerequisites of creativeness-in whatever realm-somehow have something to do with the ability to become timeless, selfless, outside of space, of society, of history.”

Moreover, Maslow realizes that the creative attitude and the ability to have peak experiences depend upon being free of other people; free, especially, from neurotic involvement, from “historical hangover from childhood, but also free of obligation, duties, fears and hopes.”

Vincent was not free, the only freedom he exercised was choosing death. He was buried in Auvers-sur-Oise and the son of his physician Paul Gachet decorated the grave with a tree from the family’s garden. In 1905 the concession for the plot ran out, and the grave site had to be moved. It was then discovered that the roots, or rhizomes of the tree had entwined the casket “as though they held him in a strong embrace.

Too proud to die, broken and blind he died

The darkest way, and did not turn away,

A cold kind of man in his narrow pride

On that darkest day. Oh, forever may

He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed

Hill, under the grass, and there grow

Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost

Or still all the numberless days of his death...

Dylan Thomas “Collected Poems”

James Laughlin, by New Directions Publishing Corporation 80 Eight Avenue, New York 10011

Epilogue

Jean Paul Satre writes about emotions in the spectator when contemplating a painting. He suggests that the aesthetic pleasure consists first by making the discovery of the subject, then by the association of thoughts that emerge as a result of the discovery and the discovery of the personality of the artist. Emile Zola, the French author and art critic, wrote in 1868 that “art is a little corner of creation seen through a temperament.” Vincent van Gogh was of the same opinion. He wrote to his youngest sister (letter W 14): “You read books to draw from them the energy to act ... But I read books to find the artist who wrote them...”

This statement could suggest that we as art therapists should view art in the holistic approach and to recognize that all artist are not mad. We have to consider the striking concordance been emotional vulnerability and creativity and the neurobiological basis of mental instability and creativity and to study how a mood disorder may nourish or sharpen creative thinking.

Further, we have to consider that it is not the imaginistic product that is important in the long run. What is significant is the process which goes into making the artistic product, because the process itself does not disintegrate or, regardless of time or place, even change very much.

Inherent in the process of producing any art are the keys that open a person to enjoying or accepting what might be considered debilitating problems and confusions. All art has a structure that persuades its creators to explore, to confront further whatever difficulties their anxieties have tempted them to express. Once known, seen and experienced, our creations could become our best friends.

My experience as an intern at the Queens Museum was to expose art to disabled children. Through media exploration, general themes, guided imagery group paintings, and name games, these children experienced the opportunity to express their inner needs in a non threatening environment. Most of the children were in total control of their creativity and choices of material and their immediate need of expression. The workshops provide for all participants the opportunity to realize that art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet our truth and we meet ourselves, we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression. We become original because we become something specific: an origin from which work flows.

Symbol and image producers we were born to be, and so symbol and image producers we must allow ourselves to become. That our particular culture gives short shrift to the obvious bodes not well for us. At present, the relatively new field of art therapy is one of the few acknowledgments that art is not merely decoration for the rich or the academic elite or the preserve of the obsessively talented. Art therapy spreads its wings to all stratas of society and facilitates through its process of creating a release for emotional anxiety. It sets in motion the possibility of understanding oneself and our environment.

Jung said that the twentieth century’s prime problem was the death of Christianity and the inability to find a metaphor to replace it. Joseph Campbell speculated that art and its creation were the only religion left. De Toqcqueville’s “Democracy in America” suggests that art embodies the individual’s power to combat the tyranny of the majority.

If art therapy is a key to unlock our unconscious via creativity, let’s give art a new meaning towards our outlook with our population and confirm their sentiments, their struggles and their victories. Their art is based upon their struggle for existence and the reflection in their work gives every individual a certain amount of dignity.

In Vincent’s work there is the reflection of this human dignity. It is as if he wants his paintings to say: if our struggle is strong enough, we can see how marvelous our world is and what a fine place to live in it might be.

Vincent Van Gogh From A Clinical Psycho-Art Therapy Viewpoint Heike E. Stucke

Too proud to die, broken and blind he died

He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed

Vincent Van Gogh
From
A
Clinical Psycho-Art Therapy
Viewpoint
Heike E. Stucke