Diagnosis: Evil
Written: Feb 19 '06 (Updated Feb 19 '06)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: An intriguing exploration into the nature of evil and its effects.
Cons: The author seems mired in his own confusion about the relationship between religion and psychiatry.
The Bottom Line: An interesting study of evil in everyday life, and how it affects the perpetrators and their victims.
|
|
|
| judy_lind's Full Review: People of the Lie : Vol 2. The Encounter with Evil... |
If M. Scott Peck's bestselling book "The Road Less Travelled" seemed to make the assumption that people need a healthy dose of God to keep their psyches in sync, "People of the Lie" makes a case for the detrimental influence of the Devil.
The mental health profession has generally been unwilling to label anyone as "evil", on the grounds that this is judgemental. Some people would try explain Hitler as being the product of an unhealthy home environment. As a clinical social worker, I once worked with a highly respected child psychiatrist whom I consulted about the case of a young mother who took every opportunity to use her six-year-old daughter as a human punching bag, when she wasn't using her as a football. The psychiatrist told me: "You know, some people are sick, and some are just mean"; i.e., they get a genuine pleasure out of hurting and demeaning other people. Peck writes about this latter group and suggests that these people could use a good exorcism to get the Devil out of their systems. In fact, in one of the later chapters of the book, Peck talks about having witnessed an exorcism which drove the malignant spirits out of a diabolically possessed individual.
Peck sees "evil" people as those who attack others instead of facing their own failures, wreaking mayhem on the lives of everyone around them. Peck's definition of "evil" is "that which kills the spirit"; "goodness" being its opposite, "that which promotes life and liveliness". He further makes a relation between evil and sin. Evil people, he says, as opposed to other people, have "crossed the line" -- they absolutely refuse to tolerate the sense of their own sinfulness. Nothing they do is wrong.
To back up his theory, Peck gives several case studies. The first concerns Bobby and his parents, two people who are so diabolical they seem to be caricatures. If they are really as Peck describes, they are hopeless of remedy, and Peck made the correct choice in getting Bobby away from these ghouls. Then there are Roger's parents, who seem to get their jollies out of beating Roger down mentally and emotionally to the point where he is little more than a robot. (Peck acknowledges that children are the most typical victims of evil people, given that they are the most vulnerable and helpless of human beings.) Then we meet Hartley and Sarah, locked in a vicious folie-a-deux, an evil wife whose browbeaten husband perpetuates the relationship, for God only knows what benefit to himself.
Peck gives us "Charlene" as a "teaching case". Charlene is a young woman in her middle thirties who has just broken up with her boyfriend. She's a thoroughly exasperating individual who seems to enjoy looking on the dark side of everything. Peck goes into great detail discussing Charlene and how she bugged the hell out of him. But that is about all she does. What is so "evil" about her, he never explains, except that she refuses to bow down to the greater glory of God. In fact, this figures strongly in Peck's definition of evil, as he relates it to Erich Fromm's concept of "malignant narcissism": the willful failure of submission to a higher benevolent power. Broken down into its elemental components, Peck seems to be saying, if you won't believe in the greatness of God, you're evil.
This is loaded stuff. Peck writes both as a clinician and as a Christian theologian and he seems to be attempting to create a synthesis of religion and psychiatry, which often leads him into some very muddled thinking, not to mention thinking which might be actually harmful to the patient. It's one thing to be strongly oriented to Christian values; it's another altogether to foist these values off on your patients under the guise of clinical therapy. Charlene may be a royal pain in the butt, and she comes across as such most of the time, but does her refusal to submit her will to God's truly make her evil? She doesn't seem to be hurting anyone but herself. If she had children, it's possible she would be a poor parent with her monumental selfishness and narcissism, but she doesn't. She's unable to sustain meaningful relationships but she doesn't seem to have harmed anyone in these short-term encounters; she appears to emerge much more damaged than her partners. So what's so evil about her? Peck never explains this adequately and given his own definition of evil, I'm not sure Charlene even qualifies as a "teaching case".
Peck's muddled thinking shows up even more clearly in the case he describes as "group evil", the American massacre of over 200 non-combatants at My Lai in 1968. On the one hand, he excoriates the participants for their inability or unwillingness to accept responsibility for their actions. On the other, he discusses the helplessness of soldiers who are told to follow orders. He can't have it both ways. If Peck wanted to do a study of group evil, he would much better have used the Wannsee Conference of 1941, in which a group of high-ranking Nazis put the finishing touches on the plan for the Final Solution. These men weren't following orders, they were preparing orders. Using the grunts at My Lai as an example of "group evil" simply weakens his case.
Throughout the book, Peck talks about the difficulty he has as therapist in relating to some of these patients. He tells us he terminated the therapeutic relationship with Bobby's parents as soon as he could because they revolted him. Well, you can't blame him for that; Bobby's parents would nauseate anybody remotely human. But his reaction to Charlene seems as overblown as his diagnosis of her as "evil". He discusses Charlene's failure to regress to childhood as the determining factor which caused her therapy to fail. Peck is very big on regression. In his view, the only way for a patient to heal is to regress emotionally to the level of a child and trust to the therapist's "paternal ministrations". He doesn't seem to recognize how patronizing and demeaning this can seem to the patient. He sees Charlene as a spoiled child and conveys this attitude to her, and then he wonders why her therapy failed.
In his earlier book "The Road Less Travelled", Peck says on page 175 that he would have sex with a patient if he thought it would be beneficial to the patient. When I picked myself up off the floor after reading that statement (Peck later said he'd omit it from subsequent editions) I wondered how in the world he could imagine for a moment that a sexual relationship between a patient and a therapist, which is generally recognized as being so damaging to the patient that it is grounds for disciplinary action in just about every state in the union (suspension of the therapist's professional license), could possibly help the patient. In "People of the Lie" he wonders if he should have held Charlene like a child who needs comforting and nurturing. One wonders if maybe Peck needs a refresher course in the fundamental boundaries in the patient/therapist relationship.
Peck writes well; I'll give him that much. He expresses his ideas clearly and succinctly with examples to back them up. He starts off by saying "This is a dangerous book." Well, it can be, but not in the way he thinks it is. The danger, for this reviewer at least, is Peck using therapy as a vehicle for expressing his religious convictions, and possibly labeling as "evil" anyone who doesn't conform with them.
I finished this book thinking that Peck has some interesting ideas that could be fruitfully explored. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of psychiatric disorders doesn't recognize "evil" as any kind of psychiatric entity, but as Peck illustrates in the cases of Bobby's and Roger's parents and with Hartley and Sarah, there are some individuals out there who don't appear to be emotionally impaired in any other sense than that they thrive off others' misery. They don't just thrive off it; they feed off it like vampires. That may be the most fundamental definition of evil yet. There's a lot out there to be researched. But I think it will take someone with a better sense of balance between religion and psychiatry to follow up.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
judy_lind
|
|
Member: Judy Lind
Reviews written: 82
Trusted by: 24 members
About Me:
An inveterate bookworm and film buff. I love good books and good movies.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.