“A life free from care” – the hermit and the analyst

In August 1965 Thomas Merton went to live full-time in his hermitage. On the eve of his move he gave a talk to the novices of Gethsemani. He described his aspirations for the hermit life. His aim he said was “to put away all care, to live without care, to not have to care.” He opposed this to the life of the world which “is a life of care… a life of useless care… self-defeating care… a life which cannot confront the inevitable fact of death.” It seems to me that this vocation to carelessness bears striking resonances with the vocation of the psychoanalyst. What I want to explore in this paper are some of the ways in which hermits and analysts get up to the same kind of mischief. I’ll look at parallels between some of Merton’s writings and writings of psychoanalysts, including Sigmund Freud, C.G. Jung, Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion.