Definitely one of the scariest and most disturbing books I've read, but it's a great book. The examples of his patients that he considered evil show exactly how these people are and how they operate. If you've always wondered why some people are evil and want to try to understand why some people are evil this book will definitely shed light on evil and at the end is a testament to the power of love to overcome it. Indeed, the author agrees by the end of the book that our only hope to heal evil is with love. This book became so disturbing I had to take a break from reading it and was anxious as I read the rest of it, but overall I'm glad I read it. I felt like I knew some of the things he pointed out about evil and evil people, especially the fact that they are the "people of the lie" and evil always involves lies in one way or another. Having come into contact with several evil people in my life I agree that human evil is common and that many people are indeed screwed up in one way or another at the hands of their parents. This was a rather grim book and the only hope came at the very end of the book in the last few pages. I agree that we should pity those who have succumbed to evil because they are desperately and deeply afraid of themselves and the truth. They can't face it and that keeps them stuck. They don't want to grow, they don't want to change, and they create chaos for themselves and others. We have to use love to smother hate and evil.

"Evil can be defeated by goodness. When we translate this we realize what we dimly have always known: Evil can be conquered only by love."

"I know that good people can deliberately allow themselves to be pierced by the evil of others - to be broken thereby yet somehow not broken - to even be killed in some sense and yet still survive and not succumb. Whenever this happens there is a slight shift in the balance of power in the world."

"There are dozens of ways to deal with evil and several ways to conquer it. All of them are facets of the truth that the only ultimate way to conquer evil is to let it be smothered within a willing, living human being. When it is absorbed there like blood in a sponge or a spear into one's heart, it loses its power and goes no further."

I could not put this book down. It was fascinating. Do we really look at evil as a disease? Do Christians understand that it is and that we have insight into how it gets healed? Do we understand that truly evil people are perhaps sitting next to us in church, holding down good jobs, even maintaining their status in the community? What does evil really look like? We think we know what it looks like when we see violent crime or genocide, but evil has so many layers and we are blind to much of evil in its subtler forms.

Dr. Peck writes with insight and experience into evil people. Perhaps the most important thing I walked away with was his definitions of evil and good that make identification much clearer for any one. "Evil, then, for the moment, is that force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness."These definitions can help not only identify evil and good people and behaviors that we see and encounter, they also help us examine our own behaviors and motivations. Are we seeking to promote life and liveliness?

Peck's other major point that should send chills into us is this: "It is not their sins per se that characterize evil people, rather it is the subtlety and persistence and consistency of their sins. This is because the central defect of the evil is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it." Evil always has to do with a lie or lies. It scapegoats, attacks, and projects evil onto others and it always involves some lie. These are the people of the lie.

I recommend this book, but it is not for the fainthearted.

The emergency did not begin at the election.
It’s death at the bottom of the lake. Rejection and unmet needs.
We eat ourselves alive from the moment we learn to share.
It’s natural. And it’s okay.
We can’t live forever. Something has to kill us.
We take care of it ourselves.
Lentement. Slowly.

It’s not about being crazy, of course. It’s about a lack of conversation.
It’s about using language that people we care about don’t understand.
And when someone doesn’t treat you like a person, you die a little death.
Even a stranger. Especially a stranger.

Me? I express a need, and then I turn around and crush myself for having it.
This is a learned behavior.

To see in Spanish is Ver. I see you. Te veo.
Estás en la última fila de la foto.

more : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6_3E...

I was very dubious of this book, and rightly so. Combine 80s psychological writing, devout Christian morals, and nearly pornographic lip-service to the Scientific Method. An atrocious book that succeeds in little other than illustrating one man’s struggles with his own idea of evil—while pretending objectivity. Predicate thinking at its most nauseating.

Read this book to do research about a character I am creating for a novel. I certainly obtained much information about evil, lying, the devil, and exorcisim in a scientific manner--very intriguing, although a bit weird and frightening. Dr. Peck does write in an engaing manner and at times I felt like I was reading a novel when he described patient scenarios. "People of the Lie" did serve its purpose and will help me create a truly wicked individual.

I never read "A Road Less Traveled" so I had no idea that M. Scott Peck was so FOS. He refers to himself at different points in the book as "open-minded" and a "hard headed scientist". Never mind the contradiction, he is neither of those things. In his attempt to label a certain form of malignant narcissism as "evil", he ends up comparing a patient who tries to seduce him to Hitler and Idi Amin. Her worst offences seem to be driving employers crazy with her own priorities and ruining his martini hour by "purposely" running out of gas. Because for him, ruining his martini makes him doubt the existence of a compassionate God the way Hitler's actions do? He also says "Autism is narcissism in its ultimate form." In the context this ignorant statement seems to imply autistic people are closer to evil than the rest of us.
All this arrogant ignorance before he even gets to his discussion of exorcisms. We are supposed to believe the two exorcisms he witnessed weren't merely demonic possessions, but Satanic possessions. The big baddy himself showed up. And Peck knows this for fact because...he read the bible?
I can't believe I finished this book, but I'm glad I did so I could read Peck's justification for rejecting the idea "Judge not, that ye be judged". He also ignores Aldous Huxley warning against being "more against the devil than you are for God" by explaining how he would "assault with love" the evil he is so focused on.
I actually started reading this book to explore evil characters in my writing. Great inspiration for a Christian villain. A psychiatrist so lost in his own narcissism that he labels a lonely autistic woman evil out of his own sexual frustrations.

Through the authors own experiences as a counselor, he comes to discover what makes people do the things they do to disrupt other peoples lives and what their hidden agenda might be. Among these are different faces and layers of evil. Though the author has seen true evil and witnessed an extreme case that needed exorcism, this will help you identify the people who are have a subtle agenda that we often don't recognize. Some of these people are evil. A very interesting read for those who enjoy psychology.

I was recommended this book by someone I did not know very well. Her description of the book made it sound very scientific. I listened to about an hour of the audio version of the book. The first two cases were interesting from the perspective of a psychiatrist and the discussion on the unhealthy behaviors and defense mechanisms was also very enlightening. However, the discussion of religion and good and evil being polar opposites went on and on and didn't really add anything to the book--it only served to take away from the authenticity of the author for me. When they started talking about exorcism, I decided I had had enough.

A strange book by the author of the much more well known 'The Road Less Well Travelled'. Although some of the case studies are interesting, the book veers between describing controlling, manipulative people as evil and discussing human evil on the one hand, and then going off on a tangent with a chapter about exorcism and how certain evil people are actually possessed by devils and even Satan on the other. Despite this supernatural element it does, however, fix on the idea that evil is a form of mental illness. As such, it attempts to come up with a psychology of evil and discuss how evil people should be treated in therapy with love, but then "bottles out" in the sense that the attempt to do so would be incredibly dangerous and most therapists wouldn't survive it with their sanity or spirituality intact. He freely admits that he found such people repellent and couldn't wait to get them out of the consulting room.

I also found it odd that he didn't class psychopaths/sociopaths as evil. They were looked on as disorganised individuals who couldn't cover up their crimes and were languishing in jail as a result (which is contradicted by killers who have successfully carried on as respectable citizens for years, and only been caught by luck or by their finally making a mistake - Dr Shipman being one obvious example who was caught only when he forged a deceased patient's will. Even when published there were surely such examples of high functioning serial murderers?) Instead, the author reserves the label of evil for those who crush the spirit of their children by not allowing them to go to the schools they would be happy to attend, or in an extreme case giving their son the same gun his depressed older brother had killed himself with.

One whole chapter is about a young woman who attended therapy for years with him and continually tried to seduce him, then finally quit when she realised it wouldn't succeed and he would only nuture her in a parenting role. Her behaviour - which was quite stalker-ish in that she would sit outside his house in her car at night - could just as easily be explained as her being a survivor of child abuse who had learned this behaviour as a young child and could only relate to a man in this way, rather than her being 'evil'. Other examples - such as the controlling wife and passive husband - would these days be seen as co-dependency, but the author diagnoses that they are both evil, the husband less so.

It is also jarring when he mentions child abusers - which he instead calls men who commit incest (which could wrongly imply consent on the part of the child) - and says that not all these people are evil. That certainly does not square with current attitudes, and given that abusers are very manipulative, e.g. grooming their victims or telling a child to keep quiet about it or they will be sent to prison as well, would surely qualify such individuals to be labelled as evil.

The chapter on the atrocities in Vietnam and the behaviour of groups especially in a hierarchical social structure was interesting, and his idea that the military should be drawn from all works of life with peaceful activities done for the community being the focus, rather than volunteers who want to fight had some merit, but there were some very outdated attitudes - for instance where he talks about the police force as exclusively male. That certainly would not have been the case even when the book was first published which I believe was in the 1970s.

So all in all, I can only rate this as a 2 star OK rating.

Quite interesting in patches but very hard to take seriously given some of the God/Satan/Evil content.

Having had my fair share of dealing with a wide range of difficult people from a wide range of social circles, my encounter with one of the most covert manipulative types, lead me to this book, as I sought to resolve the confusion left behind. Peck's take on how the science of psychiatry need not be completely separate from religion, that there is also a spiritual deficiency at play among some disordered individuals, was completely fascinating yet utterly disturbing. Many of the real life case studies of patients and incidents with no medical explanation which he described, sent chills down my spine. I agree with Peck's insights... it is a battlefield of souls out there.

"People of the lie" are what Peck calls evil people -- those who refuse to acknowledge their own sin, who scapegoat other people instead, not just occasionally but routinely. Peck believes evil people are both common and ordinary-looking, more likely to be a church deacon than a psychopath, because they create a respectable veneer that belies their callous, independent hearts. They often deceive others, but primarily they deceive themselves and avoid facing reality because they are so scared of it. Other people pay the price for their failure to love, repent etc.

Peck gives lots of case studies from his own psychiatric practice to support and illustrate his thesis. He also talks about exorcism and "group evil" (illustrated by the My Lai incident in Vietnam).

I think it's probably more accurate to say that there is a continuum of evilness -- that we all to some extent have narcissism, denial, etc. -- than to set apart some as "evil." Peck acknowledges the continuum, but I think he focuses on the truly evil because he wants the psychiatric/psychological community to acknowledge and study evilness. His goal is not so much to help evil people, who he has found in his practice to not want help, but primarily to help their victims -- including their children.

I don't agree with all of Peck's theology here -- he says he's a Christian and I can't say he's not, but he's a little skewed in places -- but I think this is a fascinating, insightful and helpful book. It's helped me to understand some members of my family and to have more peace about not pursuing closer relationships with them.

I only gave it 3 stars for theological reasons but there's some wise nuggets here that I've never seen elsewhere, so I recommend this book.