It is a well-known fact, well known to me anyway, that psychoanalysis is much like the Netherlands. No, I do not mean flat and dull but, rather, ‘pillarized’. In much of the late nineteenth century and most of the twentieth, Dutch society was typified by so-called pillars (‘zuilen’): Catholic, Calvinist or Social Democratic. You might go, say, to a Catholic school, then on to a Catholic university, join a Catholic trade union, read a Catholic newspaper, be ill in a Catholic hospital and so forth, barely ever meeting contemporaries doing the same thing in the Calvinist or Social Democratic pillars. It had the huge advantage of obviating potentially vicious social conflicts and the equally huge disadvantage of effectively institutionalizing them. The pillars began gradually to disintegrate in the later twentieth century as the bitter conflicts that had given rise to them came increasingly to seem ghostly to new generations, with new battles to fight.