Life is sufficiently hard these days (all around the world) that even people with fancy educational backgrounds are willing to come up with historically improbable new interpretations of things that happened in the past and to try and sell such interpretations for financial or academic gain. Vincent van Gogh became psychotic in his later years and his mental state is not really a dubious conclusion, whatever may have happened to his ear.

If trained professionals examine his later works, they have found and will continue to find that those works betray a slide into serious mental illness. The visual self-expression of schizophrenics has remarkably similar characteristics, and van Gogh's paintings for the year or two prior to his suicide illustrate the mental difficulties to which he was prey.

If you'd like to see a similar progression in another artist, whose later work shows amazing similarities to van Gogh's, go to Google Images and enter the search term "Louis Wain." Wain was a professional English artist who at the end of his career, in the earlier twentieth century, went mad and spent the rest of his life in an asylum, though he continued to paint.

If I had to bet money, I'd bet that Vincent cut off his own ear. If any of you out there are in any way familiar with fencing, you'll know that it's quite impossible for Gauguin to have cut off van Gogh's ear with a "rapier." That's just not what rapiers do. Take care.