You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Cogitations was the name Bion gave to his thoughts transferred to paper, as his widow, Francesca, tells us in her ‘Foreword’ to the book she edited. The first thing that has to be said is that it is a pleasure to browse through this book, in marked contrast to the overcondensed original volumes with which the reader should be acquainted. These were published by Heinemann between 1962 and 1967 and in 1971 by Tavistock, and all were reviewed in this Journal. (All are included in Seven Servants, 1977.) The excellent index makes frequent page references in this review redundant.
Cogitations covers a longer period, twenty years from 1958, and gives us the opportunity to participate in the evolution of Bion's thoughts and major themes. From the publisher's point of view Bion's early works probably turned out to be ‘sleepers’ as their merit became gradually recognized. Today his works are known to be among the most stimulating and fertilizing in the whole field of psychoanalysis, including those of his famous analyst, Melanie Klein. In these circumstances popularization becomes an obvious danger. As Hanna Segal remarks: ‘Popularization can be only too easy. One can present “Klein and Bion without tears in eight easy lessons”. It can be done by making disturbing discoveries seem anodyne, deep and complex thought appear easily understandable and acceptable when sufficiently watered down’ (Segal 1992). That is to say, if the ideas of Bion and Klein are no longer disturbing, the vital impact has been lost. True, yet Cogitations stimulated me, a non-Kleinian, almost as much as Bion's first publications did over twenty or thirty years ago when I reviewed two of them (Plaut 1968, 1972). I felt then as I do now, that here were original thoughts and intuitive insights presented concisely and with uncompromising strength.
All this does not lighten the reviewer's job. Is he going to try and cover all the contents and, so to speak, produce a concise edition of the cogitations? That woul