ABSTRACT
Thinking thoughts, living emotions, living in the terror we can feel, taking upon ourselves the suffering of others, contacting the creativity in ourselves and in our patients, and letting it emerge, are perhaps good enough reasons for living, albeit in the full awareness of the insignificance of human existence. If, that is, we could accept the claim that we are a whim of nature, as Lucretius said, and if we were aware of the terror that this generates in us (and which is all the greater the more we deny it), then perhaps we might be able to do what the British and German troops did, as Bion reminds us, at the front on Christmas Day: play football in no man’s land. If we could play with life’s non-sense, maybe to the horror of all the high-ranking fundamentalists, we would open up chinks of understanding and peace.
