Cogitations, the last of the posthumous publications, is a collection of occasional writings representing Bion's attempts to clarify and evaluate both his own ideas and those of others by casting them in written form and frequently addressing them to an imaginary audience. Covering a period between February 1958 and April 1979, Cogitations delves into a wide range of material - psychoanalysis and science, mathematics and logic, literature and semantics. Some form a background to Bion's theoretical development, showing the doubts and arguments leading to the ideas expressed in his books, others highlighting and detailing some of the more abstract points in them, and some exploring topics destined for books that were to remain unwritten.

Arguing that the problem with Descartes's Cogito ergo sum --a famous but controversial philosophical dictum--lies in a deficiency in the theory of language and logic that Cartesian scholars have brought to the study of the Cogito, Katz here proposes that the Cogito be understood as an example of "analytic entailment," a thesis according to which a statement can be a formally valid inference without depending on a law of logic.

The term 'psychoanalytical process', though occurring but rarely in Freud's works, has become firmly established nowadays despite being hard to define, explain, or pin down in conceptual or meta-psychological terms. Although it is often employed as equivalent to 'psychoanalytic work', currents of thought that draw on the idea display a certain ambivalence, for it can relate both to a theory of treatment (the practice of analysis) and to a theory of mind (a theory of psychic functioning). Before developing his own original perspectives about the consequences of the heterogeneity of psychic functioning, the author examines how various practitioners have approached this subject since Freud. He shows how each has shed useful new light on this issue, leading to a diversity of points of view, thereby justifying the idea of the 'process' within psychoanalytic treatment.

What is dialectical thinking and why do we need it in psychology? How are "moments of truth" to be psychologically discerned and differentiated? How does the recognition of the historicity of archetypal and mythological materials relate to their interpretation? In a seminar held in the El Capitan Canyon near Santa Barbara, California, in June of 2004, the renowned Jungian analyst Wolfgang Giegerich, along with conversation partners, David L. Miller and Greg Mogenson, tackled these important questions while at the same time thinking Jungian psychology forward in a radically new way. Conceived to meet "the call for more" that followed the publication of Giegerich’s landmark book, The Soul’s Logical Life, this volume also serves as the most accessible introduction to Giegerich’s approach to psychology for the first-time reader of his work. A valuable resource for students of fairy tale, myth, and depth psychology, this volume includes a complete and up-to-date bibliography of Giegerich’s writings in all languages.