Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 320 pages
- Published by: Touchstone; 25 Anv edition February 4, 2003
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0743243153
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0743243155
-
Book Dimensions:
8.3 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
- Weighs: 12 ounces
Product Review
By melding love, science, and religion into a primer on personal growth, M. Scott Peck launched his highly successful writing and lecturing career with this book. Even to this day, Peck remains at the forefront of spiritual psychology as a result of
The Road Less Traveled. In the era of
I'm OK, You're OK, Peck was courageous enough to suggest that "life is difficult" and personal growth is a "complex, arduous and lifelong task." His willingness to expose his own life stories as well as to share the intimate stories of his anonymous therapy clients creates a compelling and heartfelt narrative.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Psychotherapy is all things to all people in this mega-selling pop-psychology watershed, which features a new introduction by the author in this 25th anniversary edition. His agenda in this tome, which was first published in 1978 but didn't become a bestseller until 1983, is to reconcile the psychoanalytic tradition with the conflicting cultural currents roiling the 70s. In the spirit of Me-Decade individualism and libertinism, he celebrates self-actualization as life's highest purpose and flirts with the notions of open marriage and therapeutic sex between patient and analyst. But because he is attuned to the nascent conservative backlash against the therapeutic worldview, Peck also cites Gospel passages, recruits psychotherapy to the cause of traditional religion (he even convinces a patient to sign up for divinity school) and insists that problems must be overcome through suffering, discipline and hard work (with a therapist.) Often departing from the cerebral and rationalistic bent of
Freudian discourse for a mystical, Jungian tone more compatible with New Age spirituality, Peck writes of psychotherapy as an exercise in "love" and "spiritual growth," asserts that "our unconscious is God" and affirms his belief in miracles, reincarnation and telepathy. Peck's synthesis of such clashing elements (he even throws in a little thermodynamics) is held together by a warm and lucid discussion of psychiatric principles and moving accounts of his own patients' struggles and breakthroughs. Harmonizing psychoanalysis and spirituality, Christ and Buddha, Calvinist work ethic and interminable talking cures, this book is a touchstone of our contemporary religio-therapeutic culture.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Reader Reviews
"Life is difficult", is M. Scott Peck's opening statement to "The Road Less Travelled". Well, duh. Peck is a psychiatrist. He is also a born-again Christian who has found salvation in religion. In this book he seems to be trying to create a new kind of therapy which is a fusion of religion with psychiatry, which sometimes leads him into some very muddled thinking which could possibly be detrimental to the patient. The book is organized into four sections: Discipline, Love, Growth and Grace. In Discipline, Peck emphasizes the necessity of living a disciplined life compared to a disorganized one, doing what you need to do when you need to do it instead of living for the moment for the gratification of your own whims and humors. Sound advice which hardly needs repeating. A selfishly disorganized life with yourself at the center of your own personal universe creates mayhem for everyone around you. Not a good idea. Section 2 is about Love, which Peck feels is the driving force behind Discipline. One lives a disciplined life not only for one's self, but to provide nurturing and stability for those whom you love and who depend on you. Giving part of yourself to other people helps to build their spiritual growth as well as yours. So far, so good. But in Section 3, when he discusses Growth and Religion, and in Section 4, when he writes about Grace, Peck muddies the waters up. Peck insists that self-awareness and religion are one and the same; since everyone has some understanding of himself (a shaky premise in any event), everyone has religion, and it is incumbent upon everyone to use religion to facilitate their personal growth. And in Section 4, he expands on this by saying that our personal growth must be assisted by a higher power other than our conscious will; i.e., there can be no personal growth unless we subjugate our wills to God's. Peck has incorporated a good deal of Erich Fromm's ideas about "malignant narcissism" as a factor in emotional illness. Reduced to its fundamentals, this means people are out of sync with emotional health if they willfully refuse to accept a higher power as pre-eminent. He expands on this a great deal more in "People of the Lie", his study of human evil. What Peck appears to be saying in "The Road Less Travelled" is that everybody will be just fine once they subjugate their own will to the will of God. Otherwise, forget it. This, of course, raises the question of how are we to know the will of God? It's always struck me as the most mind-blowing arrogance that anyone can state what is God's will. But Peck apparently has no problem with this. He's perfectly comfortable with this concept, just as he conveys the impression through this book that in the patient/therapist relationship the therapist holds a god-like position and that if therapy fails it's because the patient refuses to subject his own will to that of the therapist. Please. As a mental health professional, I've seen enough successful and unsuccessful therapy to have learned that failure in therapy is not always the fault of the patient and there are some therapists out there who shouldn't be practising. Peck's unloading responsibility for failure of the therapeutic process on the patient is blatantly unfair to the patient and could produce a lot of unnecessary guilt in the patient. It also neatly absolves the therapist from any responsibility for the failure of his treatment. Peck gave me a genuine "WTF" moment in the first edition of "The Road Less Travelled", when he stated on page 175 of his book that he would have sex with a patient if he thought it would be beneficial to the patient. Whoa! No way. He didn't really say that, did he? I blinked, read it again, and almost hit the floor. (After the inevitable controversy, he said he would remove it from subsequent editions of the book.) I was still shaking my head in disbelief for ten minutes afterwards, wondering how in the world could any reputable psychiatrist believe that a sexual relationship with a patient, which is generally recognized as so damaging to the patient that it is grounds for disciplinary action in almost every state in the union (usually suspension of the therapist's professional license) could possibly help the patient. But this illustrates the fundamental problem of Peck's difficulties in observing the traditional boundaries of the patient/therapist relationship, when he attempts to inject a religious component into treatment. It's one thing to hold deeply religious views, and Peck is certainly entitled to his. It's another thing altogether to foist these views off onto the patient under the guise of psychotherapy, and then hold the patient responsible for the failure of treatment if the patient does not accept the therapist's religious views. What Peck has presented us with here is basically a "feel-good" book for people searching for easy answers to life's problems. It's been said in other ways, such as "Let go and let God", and through the Serenity Prayer ("Lord help me to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference"). But these have an element of humility in them that is missing from Peck's book. By the way he has injected religion into therapy, Peck appears to be saying that he has found all the answers to life's problems through religion, and too bad for anyone who refuses to do the same. Sure, life is difficult, as Peck so glibly states in the beginning of his book. The problem is that Peck wants us to think he's found all the solutions. If Peck had been able to keep a better balance between his religious faith and his psychiatric practice, he would have produced a much better book. When he mixes the two up to the point that you can't tell where one ends and the other begins, the book degenerates into one more religious tract, presented as a self-help book. If you're searching for superficial answers to life's problems, you may find some here. If you're looking for real answers, you will already have realized (or will, at some point down the line) that no book, including this one, can give them to you. Judy Lind
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