During his fun-filled stay at the asylum, an analysis was attempted on this crippled creature. So here now for the first time ever is the dissertation by Vincent's shrink on what he saw in his infamous (at the time) patient. Of course, his words must be put in context as he - as most psychiatrists do - had been wearing diapers and sucking on a large pacifier while rendering this.
"Eventually, I think, the heartbreak became just too much for him. Never having the woman he wanted, forever walled off from the throes of passion he craved, he had an incredible disdain for himself. It was almost as if that was his morality - his self-hate. But his pain-filled eyes told the story: he was utterly lost.
"The world was a harsh place for him, a place that hated the needy. No matter how hard he tried, he could not 'fit in'. Vincent ostensibly viewed himself as a freak, which led to much of his strange behavior. The irony, though, is that his deficiencies were simply more apparent than other's, not an exclusivity. Had he been able to conform - to hide his faults as others did - who knows what kind of life he would have led, perhaps even a mundane one. Yet we almost certainly would have been deprived of his, the most visionary of paintings.
"After being rejected by what he saw as his one true love, he was left wounded and bleeding. Scenes of love and companionship became too much for him to bear. He had given it all up! You sensed the shame in him, even without him saying a word, you knew something was wrong. Having never felt he belonged, he was always living a lie. Vincent had so much locked up inside of him, you ached to have the key to this fascinating enigma. But he was such an utter cripple in his life, even his simplest social skills eroded on him. He believed he was nobody and thus became nobody in his mind.
"He couldn't see himself objectively. He was always playing a role or a part in order to get by and he lost all sense of himself. It came to be where all he saw was his shame and inadequacies as a person, causing him to resort to hiding. Vincent felt he had committed a horrible crime he could not justify: he had robbed himself of his personal life. Eventually, his life became entwined with a desire to justify himself. But you see it was his times of being self-justified when he loathed himself the most.
"What Vincent could see objectively was reality outside of himself. Truth came easily to him and he was driven to share it with others. First, he tried religion but later said it was to be "avoided as something fatal." But an ability to see reality is not the same as an ability to deal with it. He knew he had no future as he would eventually be taken over by his sorrow.
"I think he was so successful in fooling everyone because most people never saw him in more than one setting. They knew him in one way, and that was all you got. If you could have followed him around, piecing all the parts togethor, you would have seen the full portrait of the man, you would have seen how his loneliness and isolation were like sledgehammers pounding at the very foundation of his being. This fragmenting of his personality left him a shattered identity. You could see him saying, "Is this me? Is this me?"
"This entire situation spiraled in his thirties. Vincent was desperate - extremely desperate. Except for his art, everything he would latch onto became a poison to him. Any kind of job or role would suffocate him beyond torture. He just couldn't find himself and he labeled himself a loser who let others down. He just sort of fell into this frozen terror, not seeing any future for himself. It was the most sad and sorrowful situation I had ever seen. He was a man who tried to live off his art; he just could not see his self-worth. It does not matter who you are, you just can't live without love..."