M. Scott Peck

Introduction

M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) was an American psychiatrist and best-selling author whose 1978 book The Road Less Traveled sold more than ten million copies and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over thirteen years. The book's opening sentence — "Life is difficult" — became one of the most quoted lines in late twentieth-century self-help literature, and its argument, that emotional maturity rests on discipline, responsibility, and a willingness to revise one's picture of reality, made Peck the best-known psychiatrist of his generation among general readers.

His relationship with his own profession was considerably cooler. Peck wrote as a clinician who drew on case material rather than as a researcher, and as his career progressed he moved from psychiatry toward explicit Christian theology, writing about human evil, possession, and exorcism. Colleagues who admired his clinical honesty often recoiled from his later claims, and his posthumous reputation has been shaped by a second story: the gap between the disciplined life he prescribed and the turbulent personal life he recorded in his own books.

Early Life and Education

Peck was born Morgan Scott Peck in New York City on May 22, 1936, the son of Zabeth Peck, née Saville, and David Warner Peck, a lawyer and judge. His parents were Quakers, and he was raised Protestant; his paternal grandmother came from a Jewish family, but his father identified as a WASP rather than as Jewish.

At thirteen he was sent to Phillips Exeter Academy, the boarding school on the expected track toward Harvard. It went badly. In The Road Less Traveled he recounts refusing to return after the spring holiday of his third year, at fifteen, and describes the episode as miserable. His parents sought psychiatric help; he was diagnosed with depression and recommended for a month in a psychiatric hospital unless he chose to go back to school. Peck later called the stay a turning point and, in retrospect, found the diagnosis amusing.

He transferred to Friends Seminary, a Quaker school in Greenwich Village, in late 1952 and graduated in 1954. He took a bachelor's degree at Harvard in 1958 and a medical degree at Case Western Reserve University in 1963, with premedical study at Columbia in between. He married Lily Ho in 1959, shortly after Harvard; his father briefly disinherited him over the marriage.

Academic and Professional Career

Peck spent nine years as an Army psychiatrist, rising to lieutenant colonel. His postings included chief of psychology at the Army Medical Center in Okinawa and assistant chief of psychiatry and neurology in the office of the surgeon general in Washington, D.C. He was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and, after the My Lai massacre in 1968, wrote to his superiors requesting a study of earlier military atrocities; the request was refused.

He resigned his commission in 1972 and opened a private psychiatric practice in New Milford, Connecticut, also serving as medical director of the New Milford Hospital Mental Health Clinic. That clinical work supplied the case material for his first book.

The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth was published by Simon & Schuster in 1978 against a $7,500 advance. Sales were initially slow and grew by word of mouth, helped by endorsements from Alcoholics Anonymous and religious groups and by a rave review from the writer Phyllis Theroux. It eventually became one of the best-selling nonfiction titles of its era and reportedly earned Peck around $300,000 a year in royalties. Peck himself doubted how many buyers actually read it, and Time, in 1994, suggested that the book's durability had less to do with readers being elevated than with its usefulness as a gift for an irritating friend.

In December 1984 he co-founded the Foundation for Community Encouragement, a nonprofit devoted to teaching the principles of community to individuals and organizations. The foundation suspended day-to-day operations in 2002 and resumed events in 2010.

Peck's later years were marked by illness and by candour about his own conduct. He died at his home in Connecticut on September 25, 2005, aged 69, having suffered from Parkinson's disease and from pancreatic and liver-duct cancer. His papers are held at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Discipline and the claim that life is difficult

The first section of The Road Less Traveled argues that difficulty is not an interruption of life but its normal condition, and that maturity begins by accepting that fact rather than arguing with it. From that premise Peck derived four practices he called the elements of discipline: delaying gratification, accepting responsibility for oneself and one's actions, dedication to truth, and balancing — the work of holding competing demands in view when making a decision. The claim is a moral and clinical one rather than an empirical one, and it is advanced through case histories rather than data.

Love as will rather than feeling

In the book's second section Peck attacked what he regarded as destructive misconceptions about love: that romantic love is a sound basis for marriage, that love is dependency, that love is the feeling of falling in love. He described falling in love as cathexis, a temporary collapse of ego boundaries, and defined real love instead as the will to extend oneself in order to nurture one's own or another's spiritual growth. Love, on this account, is an action and a decision, not a mood.

Evil as a clinical category

People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil (1983) proposed that some destructive behaviour is best understood as evil rather than as illness: a malignant self-righteousness in which a person protects an image of perfection by attacking others rather than facing their own faults. Peck treated this as a diagnostic pattern with recognizable features, an argument that put him in direct tension with a profession increasingly organised around descriptive diagnostic categories.

Community building

The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace (1987) set out his account of how groups become genuine communities. Peck described a sequence in which well-meaning pseudocommunity — conflict avoided in the interest of politeness — gives way to a chaotic period of honest disagreement, then to emptiness, and finally to true community. The model became the operating method of the Foundation for Community Encouragement.

Stages of spiritual development

Peck also sketched four stages of spiritual development: a chaotic, egocentric Stage I; a Stage II of blind faith in authority and simple moral categories; a Stage III of scientific scepticism; and a Stage IV in which scepticism is retained but joined to an appreciation of mystery and a capacity for compassion. He argued that the transition from Stage II to Stage III is often sharp, while the move into Stage IV is gradual.

Major Publications

The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (1978)
People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil (1983)
The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace (1987)
In Search of Stones: A Pilgrimage of Faith, Reason and Discovery (1995)
Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption (2005)

Peck also published a sequel, Further Along the Road Less Traveled, in 1993.

Impact and Legacy

Peck's influence on popular culture is beyond dispute. He brought psychiatric language into the self-help market at a scale few clinicians have matched, and his framing of love as deliberate work and of discipline as the route to maturity still circulates in counselling, recovery communities, and management training. The American Psychological Association's Division 36, devoted to the psychology of religion and spirituality, reflects a broader movement that has made religion and spirituality a legitimate topic of clinical attention — an outcome Peck advocated long before it was fashionable.

The criticisms are equally substantial, and they come from two directions at once.

From within psychiatry and psychology, the objection is that Peck's work is not science. His books rest on selected case material, offer no measurement, and make claims that are difficult to test; the assertion that "life is difficult" is a truism rather than a finding. His treatment of evil as a clinical category was challenged both for the influence of his newly adopted Christian faith on his clinical conclusions and on diagnostic grounds — critics argued that some of the cases in People of the Lie look like dissociative identity disorder, which Peck was said to have misread. He was also criticised for allegedly urging patients toward Christianity, which would breach professional boundaries. His late book on possession and exorcism, Glimpses of the Devil, drew the sharpest reaction, and his reliance on accounts from the controversial writer Malachi Martin drew further scrutiny.

From conservative Christians, the objection ran the other way: organisations monitoring "psychoheresy" faulted him for blending psychotherapy with faith, arguing that his theological conclusions were shaped by clinical assumptions rather than by scripture.

Two claims that frequently attach to Peck's name deserve a plain statement, because they could not be substantiated during fact-checking. First, no reliable record was found of a malpractice lawsuit against him in the 1980s, and none is reported in the major obituaries; this page does not assert one. Second, no reliable evidence was found that Peck was excommunicated from any church. He was baptised in a non-denominational ceremony on March 9, 1980, after which he wrote openly as a Christian, and his views drew fire from religious critics — but excommunication is a formal act by a specific body, and no such act is documented.

What is well documented is his own candour about his failures. In a 1985 interview with The Boston Globe he described himself as a flawed man with a weakness for cheap gin, marijuana, and women. In In Search of Stones (1995), the book he called his favourite, he acknowledged extramarital affairs and estrangement from two of his three children, writing that there was "an element of quest" in his romances. He and Lily divorced in 2004 after roughly forty-five years of marriage, and he married Kathleen Kline Yates. He never apologised for his faith or for his conclusions, and in 2005 restated his belief in possession in print.

That combination — a moral teacher who documented his own failures in the same voice he used to prescribe discipline — is the crux of his legacy. Detractors read it as disqualifying hypocrisy: a psychiatrist who sold self-discipline while pursuing affairs and losing contact with his children. Supporters and Peck himself read the same record differently, as the consistency of a man who insisted that dedication to truth includes truth about oneself, and who disclosed what he had every professional incentive to conceal. Both readings are available from the same documented facts, and responsible assessment requires holding them together rather than choosing one.

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References

Peck, M. S. (1978). The Road Less Traveled. Simon & Schuster.