ABSTRACT

“Cogitations” was the name Wilfred Bion gave to his thoughts transferred to paper. The physical act of writing was, he found, an aid to his thinking – typing would have been too noisy and “fidgety”. In Cogitations psychoanalysts see Bion’s growing interest in dreaming and his gradual departure from Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreaming to ideas about the function of dreams in the “digestion” and “suffering” of emotional experiences. The chapter describes two points of view – or what Bion calls “vertices” –: one in which the disordered couch is the scene of “parental intercourse”, and the “common-sense” view in which it has just been ruffled by the previous patient. Bion attempts to show the patient that in his internal world is an internal obstructive object that is getting in the way of him making use of his analysis. In Bion’s view “dreams” can be used for evacuation as well as mental digestion.