REAPING THE WHIRLWIND 235ing the death struggle of his mother when he was young had a devastat-
ing effect on the painter and may explain his brooding and cataclysmic
style of painting. Egon Schiele depicts himself in castrated, deformed,
and mutilated states in his paintings. A probable explanation here is his
troubled childhood, punctuated by the deaths of his father and four of
his siblings, and a diffi cult relationship with his mother. Frieda Kahlo,
bedridden and incapacitated for long periods of her life (due to the after -
effects of an accident, and to polio contracted at a very young age)
focused her work on distorted representations of the body. Depression
and depersonalization were major elements in the personality of Giorgio
de Chirico and his estrangement from himself is refl ected in his paint-
ings, in which themes of departure, melancholia, strangeness, eerie
emptiness, and stillness predominate. His work was also probably infl u-
enced by his sister ’ s death and his mother ’ s rejection. Not much com-
mentary is needed to explain the tragedy of self - fragmentation refl ected
in the work of Vincent Van Gogh. The emotional deprivation Van Gogh
experienced as the child of a woman mourning her stillborn fi rst son,
also named Vincent, and his knowledge that he was a replacement child,
born to fi ll the emptiness left by his brother ’ s death, had a devastating
psychological after - effect. Francisco Goya ’ s illness, experienced later in
life, had a dramatic impact on his painting. A gruesome reminder of his
change in style is refl ected in his painting of Cronos eating his own
children.
Many writers and composers also try to master their internal strug-
gle in their creative productions. Franz Kaf ka ’ s story, ‘ The Metamor-
phosis, ’ which describes his transformation into a disgusting, monstrous
insect, certainly did not result from empathic parenting. His Letter to his
Father details the perceived terrors he suffered during childhood. The
father of Edgar Allan Poe, master of the macabre, deserted the family
when Edgar was two and his mother died of tuberculosis the following
year.
The parents of the composer Johann Sebastian Bach died when he
was on ly n ine years old, and few of h is seven sibl ing s sur v ived ch i ld hood.
Themes of death and resurrection are frequent in his compositions.
Gustav Mahler ’ s Songs on the Death of Children are settings of poems by
Friedrich R ü ckert, written after the poet had lost two of his children in
the space of two weeks. Mahler lost his own daughter four years later
and wrote to a friend, ‘ I placed myself in the situation that a child of
mine had died. When I really lost my daughter, I could not have written
these songs any more. ’ The Swedish fi lm - maker Ingmar Bergman had
always struggled with inner antagonists, a result of his stifl ingly restric-
tive upbringing. This struggle led to highly neurotic but also extremely