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God geometrizes.
—attributed to Plato
This essay derives from my larger interest in “Geometry and the Mind.” That interest has arisen from a confluence between my clinical work as a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist and my longstanding extra-clinical interests in literature and the arts. I begin the essay by tracing the course of my curiosity and by outlining a working hypothesis about geometry and the mind, emphasizing both conflictual and adaptive aspects of that relationship—geometry as a defense against disorder and geometry as an act of creation. The essay then moves to a detailed examination of the life and work of Piet Mondrian. I discuss elements of his cultural, artistic, and political milieu that help locate him among his artistic contemporaries—abstract geometric artists—but also help demarcate his distinctive personal and artistic characteristics in comparison with those contemporaries.1 Part of that discussion involves an excursus