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Cogitations is the name Bion gave to the occasional short notes he had begun to write in the February of 1958 in order to clarify his thinking about the difficulties of working with psychotic patients using an unmodified psychoanalytic method – work informed by and shared with his two closest colleagues (who, like Bion, were in analysis with Melanie Klein), Hanna Segal and Herbert Rosenfeld. That clinical work formed the foundation of the clinical papers reproduced in Second Thoughts and the formulations in the four books of the 1960s: Learning from Experience, Elements of Psycho-Analysis, Transformations, and Attention and Interpretation.
The notes cover the period before, during and after the production of those books and papers; they show in detail the evolution of his ideas and theories, and, as both André Green (in his review of Cogitations, which is included in this volume) and Francesca Bion have written, they clarify many of the obscurities in the books created by Bion's antipathy for supplying his preparatory and linking apparatus, which would have gone some way to providing bridges for his readers.
Cogitations comprises notes, edited by Francesca Bion, made between February 1958 and April 1979.1 Notes that contained references to patients were omitted, although on later reading it seems clear that at least some of them might have been published with some disguising alterations. Some notes were judged to have been too personal to include. The 1994 extended version of Cogitations was compiled from Bion's notes together with the appended short report from 1967, ‘Notes on Memory and Desire’ (see Volume VI).