Yellow was Vincent Van Gogh’s favorite color. Yellow tinged the events of his life.
Two neuropsychiatrists measure themselves in a real investigation.
How will the confrontation between the young psychiatrist and the distinguished scientist end?
In his peak creative period (1880-1890) he was subjected to repeated hospitalizations, each time with a different diagnosis. After his death, the detective story thickened with new “accusations”: schizophrenia, melancholia, depression, borderline personality, syphilis, ethylism.
How is it that a painter, who in about ten years creates 823 paintings and writes 821 letters, is deemed by the distinguished psychiatrist Karl Jaspers to have schizophrenia? Into this mystery comes the author, who entrusts Dr. Emil Moreno, a young psychiatrist from Basel, with the task of clarifying whether Vincent was schizophrenic or a normal man of misunderstood genius.
The student Moreno will clash with his teacher Jaspers, author of the 1922 essay The Van Gogh Case. How will the clash end?
The plot describes Van Gogh’s intimate and traumatic events, always underestimated by doctors. The reader may side with the defense of normality advocated by Dr. Moreno and the accusation of schizophrenia motivated by Professor Karl Jaspers.
AUTHOR
GIOVANNI DE PLATO – Psychiatrist, former professor of psychiatry at the University of Bologna and director of Master’s program at the Buenos Aires site, director of the Department of Mental Health at the Ausl of Bologna Nord, WHO consultant for Latin American countries. He is author of scientific manuals and volumes, essayist, writer and columnist. His main educational texts include Handbook of Psychology and Psychopathology of the Emotions (2015); Elements of Psychiatry (2016). In 2018 he published the novel, The Son of the Best (Pendragon) and in 2020 The Mystery of Evita (Chiarelettere).
