Scott Peck
M.D. (May 22, 1936 – September 25, 2005) was an American psychiatrist and best-selling author. Peck's works combined his experiences from his private psychiatric practice with a distinctly religious point of view. In one of his books, People of the Lie, he wrote, "After many years of vague identification with Buddhist and Islamic mysticism, I ultimately made a firm Christian commitment — signified by my non-denominational baptism on the ninth of March 1980..." One of his religious insights was that people who are evil attack others rather than face their own failures. His religious views are criticized by some fundamentalist Christians

Peck was born in New York City. His parents sent him to the prestigious boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy (in Exeter, New Hampshire) when he was around 15 years old, but he did not stay there for long. In his book, The Road Less Traveled, he confides the story of his brief time at Exeter, and admits that it was a most miserable time, during which he did not cease begging his parents to let him leave until they finally agreed to let him return home. He graduated from Friends Seminary in 1954, after which he received a B.A. from Harvard in 1958 and an M.D. degree from Case Western Reserve University in 1963. He served in administrative posts in the government during his career as a psychiatrist. He was the Medical Director of the New Milford Hospital Mental Health Clinic and a psychiatrist in private practice in New Milford, Connecticut. His first and best-known book, The Road Less Traveled, has sold more than seven million copies.
 

In 1984, Peck co-founded the Foundation for Community Encouragement (FCE), a tax-exempt, nonprofit, public educational foundation, whose stated mission is "to teach the principles of community to individuals and organizations." FCE ceased operations in 2002.

Peck married Lily Ho in 1959, and they had three children. In 1994, they jointly received the Community of Christ International Peace Award. In 2004, they were separated and later divorced. Peck then married Kathleen Kline Yates.

Peck died at his home in Connecticut after suffering from Parkinson's disease and pancreatic and liver duct cancer.


The Road Less Traveled

The Road Less Traveled is Peck's best-known work, and the one that made his reputation. It is, in short, a description of the attributes that make for a fulfilled human being, based largely on his insights as a psychiatrist and a person.

In the first section of the work Peck talks about discipline, which he considers essential for emotional, spiritual and psychological health, and which he describes as "the means of spiritual evolution". The elements of discipline that make for such health include the ability to delay gratification, accepting responsibility for oneself and one's actions, a dedication to reality and balancing.

In the second section, Peck considers the nature of love, which he considers the driving force behind spiritual growth. The section mainly attacks a number of misconceptions about love: that it is about dependency, that true love is "falling in love", that love is cathexis, that love is a feeling. Instead love is about the extending of one's ego boundaries to include another, and about the spiritual nurturing of another.

The final section describes Graces — phenomena which Peck says:

nurture human life and spiritual growth
are incompletely understood by scientific thinking
are commonplace among humanity
originate outside conscious human will
He concludes that "the miracles described indicate that our growth as human beings is being assisted by a force other than our conscious will".
 

 Theories

 Discipline
In his epoch making book The Road Less Traveled, Scott Peck talked of the importance of discipline. He described four aspects of discipline:

Delaying gratification: Sacrificing present comfort for future gains.
Acceptance of responsibility: Accepting responsibility for one's own decisions.
Dedication to truth: Honesty, both in word and deed.
Balancing: Handling conflicting requirements. Scott Peck talks of an important skill to prioritize between different requirements -- bracketing.

Neurotic and genuine suffering
Scott Peck believes that it is only through suffering and agonizing that we can resolve the many puzzles and conflicts that we face. This is what he calls genuine suffering, the Christian way. By trying to avoid genuine suffering, people ultimately end up creating more causes for suffering. Unnecessary suffering is what Scott Peck terms neurotic suffering.

Scott Peck says that our aim must be to eliminate neurotic suffering and work through our genuine suffering, to achieve our individual goals.

 Evil
Scott Peck discusses evil in his book People of The Lie: The Hope For Healing Human Evil. He describes in some detail, several individual cases involving his patients. In one, a moderately impaired neurotic patient pseudo-named George, made a 'pact with the devil' to alleviate his symptoms. As a psychiatrist Scott Peck makes an uncharacteristic moral judgement about George's therapeutic pact and was ultimately successful in treating him.

Most of his conclusions about the psychiatric condition he designates 'evil' is derived from his close study of one patient he names Charlene. Although Charlene is not dangerous, she is ultimately unable to have empathy for others in any way. According to Scott Peck, people like her see others as play things or tools to be manipulated for their uses or entertainment. Scott Peck claims that these people are rarely seen by psychiatrists and have never been treated successfully.

He gives some identifying characteristics for evil persons. Discussed below are Scott Peck's views.

Evil is described by Scott Peck as "militant ignorance". In this it is close to the original Judeo-Christian concept of "sin" as a consistent process that leads to failure to reach one's true goals.

An evil person:

Projects his or her evils and sins onto others and tries to remove them from others
Maintains a high level of respectability and lies incessantly in order to do so
Is consistent in his or her sins. Evil persons are characterized not so much by the magnitude of their sins, but by their consistency
Is unable to think from other people's viewpoints.
Most evil people realize the evil deep within themselves but are unable to tolerate the pain of introspection or admit to themselves that they are evil. Thus, they constantly run away from their evil by putting themselves in a position of moral superiority and putting the locus of evil on others. Evil is an extreme form of what Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled, calls a character disorder.

In a discussion on group evil, Scott Peck talks about the My Lai Massacre tragedy during the Vietnam war:

In the spring of 1972 I was chairman of a committee of three psychiatrists appointed by the Army Surgeon General, at the request of the Chief of Staff of the Army, to make recommendations for research that might shed light on the psychological causes of MyLai, so as to help prevent such atrocities in the future. The research we proposed was rejected by the General Staff of the Army, reportedly on the grounds that it could not be kept secret and might prove embarrassing to the administration and that "further embarrassment was not desirable at that time". (Chapter 6, "MyLai: An Examination of Group Evil")
Scott Peck makes great efforts to keep much of his discussion on a scientific basis. He says that evil arises out of free choice. He describes it thus: Every person stands at a crossroads, with one path leading to God, and the other path leading to the devil. The path of God is the right path, and accepting this path is akin to submission to a higher power. However, if a person wants to convince himself and others that he has free choice, he would rather take a path which cannot be attributed to its being the right path. Thus, he chooses the path of evil.

Peck's writings on evil are to some extent based on accounts of apparent demonic possession and exorcism by Malachi Martin. However the veracity of these accounts has been questioned.

Love
His perspective on love (in The Road Less Traveled) is that love is not a feeling, it is an activity and an investment. Love is primarily a concern for the spiritual growth of another. Love cannot be sustained by mutual dependence, rather, love between two parties is made stronger when they are completely independent of one another.

Scott Peck seeks to differentiate between love and cathexis. Cathexis is what explains attractions to the opposite sex, the instinct for cuddling pets and pinching babies' cheeks. However, cathexis is not love. All the same, true love cannot begin in isolation, a certain amount of cathexis is necessary to get sufficiently close to be able to truly love.

 The four stages
Scott Peck postulates that there are four stages of human spiritual development:

Stage I is chaotic, disordered, and reckless. Very young children are in Stage I. They tend to defy and disobey, and are unwilling to accept a will greater than their own. Many criminals are people who have never grown out of Stage I.
Stage II is the stage at which a person has blind faith. Once children learn to obey their parents, they reach Stage II. Many so-called religious people are essentially Stage II people, in the sense that they have blind faith in God, and do not question His existence. With blind faith comes humility and a willingness to obey and serve. The majority of good law-abiding citizens never move out of Stage II.
Stage III is the stage of scientific skepticism and inquisitivity. A Stage III person does not accept things on faith but only accepts them if convinced logically. Many people working in scientific and technological research are in Stage III.
Stage IV is the stage where an individual starts enjoying the mystery and beauty of nature. While retaining skepticism, he starts perceiving grand patterns in nature. His religiousness and spirituality differ significantly from that of a Stage II person, in the sense that he does not accept things through blind faith but does so because of genuine belief. Stage IV people are labelled as mystics.
Scott Peck argues that while transitions from Stage I to Stage II are sharp, transitions from Stage III to Stage IV are gradual. Nonetheless, these changes are very noticeable and mark a significant difference in the personality of the individual.


The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (Simon & Schuster, 1978)
People of the Lie: The Hope For Healing Human Evil (Simon & Schuster, 1983)
What Return Can I Make? Dimensions of the Christian Experience(Simon & Schuster, 1985) (republished by Harpers in 1995 under the new title, Gifts For the Journey: Treasures of the Christian Life)
The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace (Simon & Schuster, 1987)
A Bed By the Window: A Novel of Mystery and Redemption (Bantam, 1990)
The Friendly Snowflake: A Fable of Faith, Love and Family (Turner Publishing, Inc., 1992)
A World Waiting To Be Born: Civility Rediscovered (Bantam, 1993)
Meditations From the Road (Simon & Schuster, 1993)
Further Along the Road Less Traveled (Simon & Schuster, 1993)
In Search of Stones: A Pilgrimage of Faith, Reason and Discovery (Hyperion 1995)
In Heaven As On Earth: A Vision of the Afterlife (Hyperion, 1996)
The Road Less Traveled and Beyond: Spiritual Growth in an Age of Anxiety (Simon & Schuster, 1997)
Denial of the Soul: Spiritual and Medical Perspectives in Euthanasia and Mortality (Harmony Books (Crown), 1997)
Golf and the Spirit: Lessons for the Journey (Harmony Books, 1999)
Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption (Free Press, January 19, 2005)