Toward Bion's starting point: between catastrophe and faith.

Catastrophe and faith are explored as the most basic terms of Bion's work. In doing so it is shown how Bion gets underneath Kleinian concepts to expand the depth phenomenology of a catastrophic sense of origins. For Bion the self is born, evolves and dissolves with a sense of catastrophe. Whether or not Bion is right in various aspects of his account, catastrophe is an elemental term of our existence. For Bion, Faith is a proper primordial and developed response to catastrophe. This paper discusses aspects of the relationship between faith, knowledge, container-contained and catastrophe.