The conscience of Vincent Van Gogh.

he letters that Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his younger brother, Theo, document this painter’s thoughts over a period of 20 years with the same brilliance and clarity of his canvases. As a contribution to literature, these letters stand on the same level as Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and far above Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography. They reveal that Van Gogh was stifled by depression often through a life ending at age 37 by his committing suicide. What accounted for his mental illness, I believe, was primarily that he had the conscience of a Christian clergyman, and it tormented him. Freud believed that a person’s mind consists of an ego, or self, that is subject to three masters (1). The first is the external world, or reality. The second is one’s libido, or id. The third is one’s conscience, or super-ego. Regarding the external world in which Van Gogh lived, all but a few people failed to appreciate his work, and the artist lived in poverty all his adult life. Regarding his libido, it was sublimated, for the most part, to artistic creativity (2). Regarding his conscience, it confined him and was the chief force in his self-destruction. If a thin, transparent sheet of ice were a metaphor of his ego, the blistering wind above would represent the external world, the fathoms beneath would represent his artistic instinct, and the foot that cracks the ice would be his conscience. The conscience of a person, or what Freud called the superego, consists of those moral beliefs instilled by one’s parents. It is a collection of ideal standards to which one aspires. Van Gogh’s Christian conscience was fully shaped at age 24 when he wrote: