ABSTRACT
Bion began the presentation of his ideas to his colleagues in the British Psychoanalytical Society by apologising for not having pre-circulated his paper. In fact, as was his way, there was no paper. Bion was following his usual preference at this time of his life, giving a fairly spontaneous spoken version of ideas which he had hand-written as a series of notes, which he called ‘cogitations’. As he spoke he held these in his mind much as a jazz musician will collate syncopated phrases as navigational ‘waypoints’, as it were, not necessarily traversed in the sequence in which they first arose in his mind when he had first noted them. Accordingly, he really did mean it when sometimes he began a talk by saying that he looked forward to discovering what it was that he was going to say.
