Dr St Clair was younger than Dr Fairbairn. At thirty-two, a good twelve years separated them, but that was not by any means all. Dr St Clair was Australian, of Scottish ancestry, while Dr Fairbairn, who had been born in Selkirk, had never lived outside Scotland, apart from during a brief period – just over a year – when he had been a registrar at the Tavistock Clinic in London. But the differences did not stop there: Dr Fairbairn was inclined to accept the diktat of Vienna – he was deeply immersed in Freudian interpretations – whereas his successor, being the product of an eclectic training, was open to a wide range of explanations of human behaviour and, of course, misbehaviour. His approach was more philosophically inclined than Dr Fairbairn’s, stressing the role of thought and choice above that of emotional states and the dark promptings of the id. Indeed, had a coin once tossed on a particular summer evening in Melbourne fallen one way rather than the other, he would have studied for a degree in philosophy rather than one in psychology, and his whole life would have been different. That, of course, is a sobering thought, and it stayed with him; if the broad shape of a life can be determined by such a chance, then what claims can there be for freedom, for self-determination? We are putty, surely, in the hands of the gods, foolish to think that we are in control of the lives we lead.

And it does not stop there. It is salutary to remember how many of the features of our lives are not only not our own creation, but the result of events that took place even before we were born, sometimes several generations ago. And this applies not only at an individual level, but at a collective one too: what we are depends, to an extent, on where we are. That one is born in Aberdeen, or Chicago, or Gdansk – or wherever it is – dictates one’s culture and, to some extent, moulds one’s outlook on life. That is hardly a novel observation, but still bears reflection. For a long time being Scottish brought, for many, a particular view of the world: a resilience in the face of difficulty, a certain intellectual seriousness, a belief in individual responsibility and individual salvation – concomitants all of the Scottish Reformation. But had John Knox been more in touch with his feminine side, it might have been different; iconoclasm might have been less pronounced – and less artistically destructive – and rather than the nineteenth-century cliché of the Scottish ship’s engineer, one might have had the cliché of the Scottish interior decorator. It did not happen, of course …