MERTON'S CORRESPONDENCE WITH:
Zilboorg, Gregory, 1891-1959
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Descriptive Summary
Record Group: Section A - Correspondence
Dates of materials: 1956
Volume: 7 item(s); 13 pg(s)
Scope and Content
In this file is one letter from Gregory Zilboorg to Merton written shortly before the two men met in person. Zilboorg makes recommendations about what he thinks Merton should be reading concerning psychoanalysis.
Biography
Gregory Zilboorg was a prominent psychiatrist and convert to Catholicism. Merton obtained a rare permission to leave Gethsemani to hear Gregory Zilboorg lecture at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. Merton spoke privately to Zilboorg of his desire for more solitude and to live as a hermit at Gethsemani or to leave if that were not possible. Zilboorg considered his feelings pathological, a message Dom James, Merton's abbot, was happy to hear. It is questionable whether Zilboorg's harsh criticism, some of which may be defended, was unbiased. Merton's pre-monastic interest in Sigmund Freud was rekindled, and Zilboorg may have felt threatened by another prominent Catholic convert writing on the subject. Zilboorg writes to Merton from New York. (Source: The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia, p. 550.)
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Related Information and Links
See also the "Fox, James" file (Series 9).
Other Finding Aids
If the person in correspondence with Merton has full text records in the Merton Center Digital Collections, there will be a numeric link to them below.
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