Q. Would you speak about the religious cult and the aesthetic impulse, and the relationship between them.
Bion. In psycho-analysis, and even in ordinary conversation, one is always talking about religion or art or business, all of which is very useful if you want to talk; it is another matter if you want to talk about the thing itself. You can easily feel from your own experience that these watertight compartments of categories have a lot to do with human thinking but very little to do with the universe in which we live. Nevertheless, however ignorant or mistaken we may be, we can feel that religion and art have often worked closely together. The same can be said for psycho-analysis insofar as it can be regarded as an attempt at a scientific approach. Sooner or later one will feel that one knows the interpretation but does not know what to say to the patient, or how to say it. At this point the psycho-analyst would gain if he could be an artist and express himself, as Freud could, in terms which are easily appreciated as being highly artistic. Even Plato, while critical of artists and poets as people who are always misleading their fellows by telling lies, nevertheless expressed things, in the Socratic Dialogues, in a way which no artist has since excelled—and yet he might be supposed to have been opposed to the artist. This kind of conflicting view is common; the artistic or aesthetic capacity seeps into the expressions of those who want to be purely scientific; and the artist, reciprocally, can discern the science in his art. [See p. 44. Sometimes he can even consciously aspire to a ‘golden number’, as with Leonardo da Vinci, Durer etc.]
Wilfred Bion, Sao Paulo Seminar 1973 (Brazilian Lectures, Karnac Books, Reprinted 2008, Copyright © 1990)
authentic analysis 