Vincent Van Gogh Is A Foster Child. Consequences Of WIP

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

I love Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night. This is a masterpiece that I can look at for hours. ❤ But what prompted the artist to paint such pictures? What inspiration, and perhaps an inner search for yourself. Or inner pain?

And this is what Benezek and Addad write about the artist in 1984: “The artist came into this world with an identity that did not belong to him entirely, because in the perception of his parents he was replacing his deceased brother. Obviously, his life was overshadowed by the fate of the first Vincent. it is known that when one child replaces another who died in infancy, certain problems arise.

Parents tend to impose the idealized image of the firstborn on the child when they are born. The anxiety of parents who are afraid of losing their second child also creates a strong sense of their vulnerability, which is probably exacerbated by feelings of fratricidal guilt."

The artist had an older brother, also Vincent, who was born on March 30, 1852, but died on the same day. The artist Vincent was born exactly one year later, on March 30, 1853.

So what is this? Unconscious desire of parents, and especially mothers, to make up for the loss - "to revive a dead baby"? After all, they not only named the future artist after the deceased, but also gave birth to him on the same day and month, only a year later.

The Vincent we know is a foster child. He was born in a world of pain, grief, irreparable loss, he was born into a family in which the idealized image of the deceased was literally worshiped. He occupied the emptiness that appeared as a result of the death of the first child. Vincent was given the name and place of the deceased and taken away from his place - the place of a living child and thus deprived of his right to be himself.

Being a foster child means already having someone else's name. He has no right to be himself, because he must become the predecessor or the one he is forced to replace.

How could Vincent II feel? Who did he feel like? Are you yourself? Or dead? He considered himself "at best a substitute for his deceased brother, at worst - his murderer" (V. Forrester) and felt his connection with him so strongly that he doubted his own existence, especially that he was an artist.

The idealization by the parents of a child who has died overestimates the level of the ideal self of a living child. This idealization arises from unlived mourning. There is a rivalry between the dead and the living, and hence the loss of self-identification, tk. his parents unconsciously make him look like the ideal deceased. Van Gogh lives under the burden of unbearable idealizations about the deceased and constant comparisons with him. Therefore, Vincent doubted himself all the time as an artist. It seemed to him that only his predecessor could draw perfectly.

The feeling of guilt of the survivor (because if the first Vincent had not died, then the second Vincent might not have been born) causes depression in the artist. The constant fear of taking a place in the world of the living - the fear of being a survivor, the fear of declaring oneself, raises doubts in one's creativity, in one's identification, in one's right to life and, as a result, insanity.

Vincent wrote: "I struggle with all my might, trying to overcome any difficulties, because I know that work is the best lightning rod for ailment. There is only one cure for such ailments - hard work."

Maurice Poro writes: "These words confirm that a substitute child, a candidate for" madness ", has a loophole -" genius ", a talent that can only be revealed in work."

In order to survive, the substitute child must symbolically / mentally kill the "dead man", remove from himself the label of a dead child, which was awarded by the parents. But not every person is capable of this without personal therapy.such a story will be hidden in the depths of the subconscious, and for healing it is necessary to realize, live and scar the repressed wound, only then a person could face his own reality and free himself from the imposed one. Vincent did not have such an opportunity, therefore, to separate from the deceased, he had two ways: genius or insanity.

And I think about how sometimes unconsciously, and sometimes traditionally, people call a newborn in honor of someone: be it a deceased child, be it a loved one, an uncle, aunt, grandfather, grandmother, a significant person for the family, in whose honor something, but not in honor of himself. And then the question arises, whose life will a child with an "alien" name live, whose symptoms will he bear?

Be healthy.