We have traveled a full circle now. Now we once again pose the question: why did van Gogh cut off his ear? The progression of his mental state is clear from the works he has done in Arles. In the end, when the climax of his isolation occurred when receiving a letter from Theo, he was just not strong enough to cope with himself anymore. Martin Bailey asserts in the article Drama At Arles: New Light on van Gogh’ Self-Mutilation that “”Van Gogh feared abandonment … quite possibly by Theo”. This manifested in the brutal assault on himself in the charge of his madness. But the truth is that what led to this madness was not only a medical issue, as most of the speculations would suggest. It was the loneliness and isolation he encountered, and developed, throughout all the time he spent in Arles. He was a man after all, and as such, the progressing closing into himself consistently tortured him and eventually culminated with the madness of brutally mutilating himself. Moreover, this was not an ephemeral state that he was in. This was a permanent stain in his personality, from which he never recovered, what we see from the fact that only a few years after, van Gogh murdered himself.