ABSTRACT
If our task is to make contact with the infinite through an act of understanding, I must emphasize that this act of understanding is not just an intellectual act. Bion said this, although I have a suspicion that people haven't quite realized that he said it; he said that in order to have an act of understanding there has to be: (1) the intellectual grasp, an illumination; but he says also that there has to be (2) what he referred to as a move from PS to D. PS to D sounds a scientific type of business, but what he meant was from a paranoid way of looking at things—which basically means that you look at things as something that is outside and something that is hated outside or feared outside—to depressive, where you realize something inside. That is the basic religious position. He was saying that the scientific and the religious have to intersect; that the scientific act of understanding will only come if it's connected to what he referred to as a depressive state—that is, a state of concern—and this is not concern for the other but concern for the ultimate, or the infinite. Neither science on its own nor religion on its own will do the trick.
