Van Gogh’s Mental Illness: Was Epilepsy Responsible for His Madness & Genius? | Big Think

Van Gogh’s Mental Illness: Was Epilepsy Responsible for His Madness & Genius?

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Psychiatrist Dr. Gail Saltz discusses the artistic qualities that make Vincent van Gogh legendary, and how his unusual personality, affected by a certain mental disorder, affected his work. We know, for example, that Van Gogh was both highly disagreeable and "sticky," meaning he had a deep need for friendship despite his quarrelsome nature. His relationships with his brother and fellow painter Paul Gauguin, not to mention his various liaisons with women he wasn't suited for, take us a stop closer to understanding how Van Gogh's mental state affected his artistic output.

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GAIL SALTZ:

Dr. Gail Saltz is a bestselling author of numerous books and the go-to expert on a variety of important psychological issues. She is Chair of the 92nd Street Y "7 Days of Genius Advisory Committee" and Consultant and Event Moderator for the Clinton Foundation's Health Matters Initiative. Dr. Saltz is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the NY Presbyterian Hospital Weill-Cornell School of medicine, a psychoanalyst with the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and has a private practice in Manhattan.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Gail Saltz: So most people are familiar with the idea that Vincent Van Gogh had mental illness. Different camps so to speak of mental illness almost like to claim Van Gogh as their own. So groups say, you know, oh he had schizophrenia. He had bipolar disorder. I would argue that Van Gogh who clearly had documented certain symptoms which ranged from being high irritable and at the same time what’s called very sticky. Stickiness is a psychiatric term which means you bond to people and sort of cling on and keep engaging with them in a very, very intense way. But when someone is both sticky and irritable it causes what happened to Van Gogh which is he would make these intense relationships with his brother for example, with Gaugin. So certain artists and with women that wouldn’t necessarily be suitable women for him. And at the same time he would then have these tremendous arguments and fights with them. So they were chaotic relationships and they were I’m very close, no I can’t have anything to do with you that really reeked terrible havoc in his life. In addition to those two symptoms he also suffered with extreme depression at various times, real mood lability. So sometimes he was intensely depressed. Other times he was seemingly more up.

And those go together along with something very interesting which is his paintings. So in his paintings we see intense color and a difference in terms of paintings that proceeded it which were more realistic. His paintings have this more abstract quality almost in some ways like a nightmarish quality to them. And that makes you think about again what was going on in his mind that he produced something like that. If you look at all of those qualities you think about temporal lobe epilepsy. Temporal lobe epilepsy is not like other forms of epilepsy where you have a seizure happen that you can see because it’s happening in the temporal lobe which is an emotional center of the brain. So that symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy are this mood lability, stickiness, irritability, irascibility and so being a frustrating person and visual hallucinations. So seeing visually in your own mind intensities of color, heightened sensory visual stimuli like this essentially Starry Night or, you know, something that looked very dramatic, impressionistic. Or even visual hallucinations that alter what someone else looks like. So people who have temporal lobe epilepsy might look at your face and see distortions.

And of course when we look at some of Van Gogh’s paintings you often do see such distortions. The interesting thing is that ultimately when he was hospitalized in Remy the doctor actually thought he did have epilepsy and treated him for epilepsy. So there was even knowledge at that time that there could be this kind of illness causing his problems. And in fact this all fits with the time periods during which he becomes most ill which is when he would drink absinth. Absinth was an alcohol that was very in during various periods of Van Gogh’s life and it has a very high pure alcohol content which lowers the seizure threshold in the brain.......

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