Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redempti

M. Scott Peck fascinates me. A psychiatrist who wrote widely acclaimed books (such as The Road Less Traveled) who struggled with a number of personal demons (alcohol, nicotine, amorous affairs), who professed Christianity which at some times seems quite liberal but at other moments almost evangelical/charismatic in its nature.

In this book he discusses his start as an unbeliever in demonic spirits, his attempt to test the matter scientifically, and his eventual decision that the demonic does exist and his performing of two exorcisms.

The book felt choppy to me but seemed also an authentic attempt to express things that are difficult to understand which could result in public mockery, even the stripping of professional credentials.

I read this volume in part because I am also reading his People of the Lie which is a more psychological approach to the question of human evil.

After First Reading

This was a fantastic book. Peck is the first person to give us a proper account of exorcisms which is intelligently explained, completely and utterly convincing, and pretty damned scary. As a psychiatrist, he details his daunting experiences with two particular patients who claim to be possessed by a demonic entity. Using his expertise and medical knowledge, he is neither biased nor at all ignorant in his dealings with this controversial subject. I won't say if he is successful or not, but I can tell you that in both cases he really does get glimpses of the devil, and manages to establish this terrifying privilege with nothing but medical expertise and a deft understanding of the human mind. The psychological triggers for one of the patients is truly startling.

After Second Reading

Yep. Pretty much what I said before. I admire Peck's bravery in publishing on such a misunderstood concept. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of doctors in the psychiatric community who laughed behind his back. But Peck comes across as very down-to-earth. He's the best kind of Christian in that he still has the ability to doubt things and question them. All the same, while I do believe he speaks in earnest, some of this book probably should be taken with a grain of salt. (Oh, you like salt with your dinner? Well, then, a grain of something you don't like, you fucking smartarse, you). I found it a little silly how quickly Peck jumped to the conclusion that he was dealing with Satan himself. I suppose it's one of those having to be there to understand it kind of things.
On reading some less positive reviews for this book though, some questions were asked which I think could lead to answers quite as horrifying as the thought of demonic possession. Specifically the the possibility that, through his own obsession with prodding these mysteries, Peck projected the idea of possession into his patients and this, in turn, led to the downfall of one of them. It is conceivable that someone could become convinced that they're possessed when really they are just schizophrenic or woke up on the wrong side of the bed or some damned thing. That would make Peck quite the villain.

But look here, I don't think that was the case. I think Peck probably was the genuine article, and I certainly can get behind his wistful proposition that such areas as this should not be pushed into the realm of fiction by medical professionals as they have been. Science and religion are worlds apart now, and that's unfortunate because either one dispelling the other is a dead-end road to understanding our place in the universe. There's just so many Atheists that one day God will be nothing more than a fictional fantasy like Hogwarts and unicorns and my imaginary girlfriend.

This is an extremely interesting book. The author, Dr. Scott Peck, is a well known psychiatrist and author. In his practice, he has seen situations in which modern medical thought is not sufficient to explain what is the problem for some of his patients. In People of the Lie he presented a number of situations in which either the patients or their family exhibited behavior that that was evil and yet they didn't suffer from a known mental illness. This book goes beyond those earlier stories to incidents of actual possession.

I met Dr. Peck when he came to our church for a weekend seminar and our small group came to know him very well. We were impressed with his wisdom and intelligence as well as his honesty and forthrightness.

In this book, he discusses cases of his which involved actual possession. He knew Malachi Martin, author of Hostage to the Devil and discussed some of these cases with him.

People today are reluctant to even entertain the notion of a personal devil and yet as far back as the earliest records almost every civilization has a belief in devils. It is only the last 75 years that people have rejected the idea, especially when their image seems to only include a person in read tights with a trident and horns. C. S. Lewis says that the devil is just as happy when people are obsessed with him as when they ridicule him. Either way, he is camouflaged and can go about his work.

This is a great book to read with an open mind and learn from.

when I give this book 3 stars, I mean it is an entertaining read, particularly for someone with a mental health background. It's full of bullshit, but it's entertaining bullshit.

Very, very fascinating. I'm not a huge believer in Satan, but this opened my mind a little on the subject of possession.

My favorite parts:

"I gave examples from my clinical practice of how love was not wholly a thought or feeling. I told of how that very evening there would be some man sitting at a bar in the local village, crying into his beer and sputtering to the bartender how much he loved his wife and children while at the same time he was wasting his family's money and depriving them of his attention. We recounted how this man was thinking love and feeling love--were they not real tears in his eyes?--but he was not in truth behaving with love." [pg 55:]

"Since the primary motive of the evil is disguise, one of the places evil people are most likely to be found is within the church. What better way to conceal one's evil from oneself as well as from others than to be a deacon or some other highly visible form of Christian within our culture." [pg 148:]

The most interesting thing about M. Scott Peck, M.D. is his credibility. He is a graduate of Harvard and Case Western Reserve and he was at first highly skeptical of this subject. While I may not be 100% convinced, Peck is the type of credible, mentally stable, intelligent source that I look for when researching a new subject. He's no religious nut. He encourages questioning and doubting. He's a Christian I can get on board with. Dammit, I just looked him up and he passed away in 2005. I would have liked to have dinner with the man.

I feel a little unfair rating this book, since I'm apparently not anywhere near the intended audience. Peck is not going to convince anyone who doesn't already believe in actual demons and in Satan as an entity, and even those who believe in such things might find that this book stretches their credulity.

This book, as near as I can figure, expands upon two situations mentioned in Peck's earlier work, People of the Lie, where he encountered women in his psychiatric practice who he believed to be possessed. In the early eighties, Peck became interested in exorcism and possession and whether these could somehow be scientifically proven. In the process, he became acquainted with Malachai Martin, author of Hostage to the Devil. This already had my eyebrows shooting up, since Martin was a controversial figure and more than a little bit of a huckster. Martin eventually asked Peck to investigate the case of a young woman named Jersey, who believed herself to be possessed.

Peck meets Jersey, and almost immediately recognizes the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder, yet he uses hypnotism to speak directly to the "demons," and they convince him that there might be some truth to Jersey's belief. He agrees to continue to investigate the case. Soon after this, during a psychiatric interview, Jersey suddenly has what appears to be a psychotic break, exhibiting symptoms of schizophrenia, but this ends abruptly when Peck tells her to "cut it out." Peck finds this sudden change "breathtaking," and he takes it as evidence of possession. This is interesting, since I've read at least one account of a woman with BPD who suffered from extremely brief episodes of psychosis that usually resolved themselves within an hour. Anyway, Peck goes ahead with a deliverance (an intense prayer session designed to relieve the sufferer of demonic influences), and when that affords only temporary relief, he performs a full-on exorcism, which takes four days. At the end, there is a marked improvement in Jersey's condition, but Peck himself states that his initial assessment was that "at most, what the exorcism did was to transform a severe untreatable borderline personality into a severe treatable one."
At this point, my reaction as a reader was basically that I thought Peck was misinterpreting psychiatric symptoms as demon possession, but Jersey did seem to be helped by the exorcism, so maybe it was a case of "no harm, no foul." Then Peck does something I consider to be unconscionable.
Peck is of the belief that possession can only occur if the victim leaves the demons an opening. Because both he and Jersey have come to believe that Jersey was possessed sometime around twelve years old, Peck spends a lot of time trying to find out what happened that gave the demons a foothold. Gradually it comes out that after Jersey had her appendix out when she was twelve, her father sexually molested her under the guise of medically examining her. While her father had a PhD in psychology and had a practice of seeing his patients in a starched white coat, he was not a medical doctor. Jersey emphatically swears up and down that she thought he was, but Peck tells her that at the age of twelve, she should have known that he was not a medical doctor and that what he was doing was wrong. Thus, her decision to lie to herself was what gave the demons a foothold and caused her possession. Peck emphatically tells her that no one would blame her, and that it was perhaps a necessary lie -- but it was a lie nonetheless, and that's what caused her to be infested by demons for the following fifteen years. "During the twelve days that followed," Peck writes, "we were to go over her father's sexual molestation several times, elaborating on the unfairness of it as well as the unfairness that the devil had taken advantage of such a tiny and pardonable wrong choice. But I also emphasized during those times that it had been, in fact, a wrong choice on her part. ... I repeatedly told her that God is truth, and truth is what is real. The choice to believe her father's lie because it was the less painful alternative was a choice to believe unreality. And unreality belonged to the devil.(p. 83)" I, frankly, have no words to respond to this, except that I consider it to be one of the most f-ed up things a therapist could tell a survivor of sexual abuse.
At any rate, this is getting long, but my main reaction on reading this case study and that of the other woman Peck exorcised, is that I'm glad that Peck stopped practicing as a psychiatrist in the mid-eighties in favor of the lecture circuit, and I hope he didn't infect too many other mental health professionals with his ideas.

A creepy, well-written and compelling read. Left me mildly disturbed.

I need to just step away from the crazy.