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During the year 1952 I was asked to give two lectures on any subject I liked. Neither was published, and I am including parts of the second one as I see it as leading up to the next long paper, about symbolization, written in honour of Melanie Klein (see Chapter 9). The first one was given to the medical staff and nurses of the Cassell Hospital. I chose the subject ‘The Uses of Absentmindness’, thus again thinking about aspects of concentration. During the discussion everybody started telling me about the settings in which they were able to enjoy undirected thinking, reverie, or absentmindnesss. For one it was when she was using a vacuum cleaner; it made a sort of cocoon of sound. For one of the men it was when he was driving his car at a particular speed on a nice road, and of course for some of the men it was fishing.
Next, also 1952, I was asked to go to Leeds University to a handpicked audience of staff, including Marjorie Hourd who was working there on a fellowship and writing The Education of the Poetic Spirit.1 Again I was asked to talk about whatever I liked. What I said was never published, and my notes are by now somewhat dismembered. However, I have assembled some of them to quote here, because although they are not ostensibly about psychoanalysis, clinical experience was at the back of them. The title seems to have been ‘Aspects of Absentmindness in Relation to Creative Process’. I said I was going to present certain beads of experiences of my own and hoping with the help of the audience to spin a thread for some of them. I began by talking about different ways of trying to draw, using experience that I had already tried to describe in the book about not being able to paint.2 I told how I had discovered two ways of