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Francesca Bion introduces Cogitation with the remark that this series of entries from Bion's notebooks is ‘the last of the posthumous publications, which have given me so much pleasure to prepare’. It is a fascinating addition to the canon.
We can see clearly how Bion was drawn to many of the possibilities in Klein's 1935 paper on the depressive position, and was able to rework the concepts of paranoid schizoid and depressive positions to a point at which they owed only a nominal relationship to Klein's theory. Many of the entries reveal how he came to believe that thinking entailed some persistent oscillation between the paranoid schizoid and the depressive positions, in place of some notion of an enduring linear development:
In the chaos of unconnected, incoherent facts I see the point -the selected fact. If I am wise, I reject it and reassume chaos … And may not this give rise to situations in which the patient appears enviously to reject an interpretation that he accepted the day before? That is to say that as well as envy, it may be an example of failure to return to paranoid schizoid, and a wish to make the analyst do so; he has to feel that the whole of the mass of discrete objects has again lost its coherence and cohesion.
In close company with this theme, there are many carefully-argued entries in which Bion works out the psychoanalytic implications of Pioncare's theory of the selected fact and his own theory of alpha function as a theory of meaning evolved through dream life. All these ideas are contributions to his understanding of the depressive position:
Without alpha-elements it is not possible to know anything. Without beta-elements it is impossible to be ignorant of anything; they are essential to the functioning of projective identification; any unwanted idea is converted into a beta-elements, ejected from the