Understanding human evil is the subject of this book. The author takes both a theological and a therapeutic approach. He claims that he often comes across evil people in his work as a psychotherapist. The evil people are not necessarily the ones who come in for treatment. Often it is a family member of the evil person who comes in for treatment. Clearly, living with an evil person would create psychological problems. Some of Peck's examples are of parents who pretend to love their children, but actually try to sabotage them. One pair of parents even gave their son as a Christmas present the gun that his brother used to kill himself.
His conclusion is that the central defect of evil people is a fear of seeing their own flaws. They never see themselves as to blame, and instead always blame others. They do not want to fix themselves.
Self-deception is at the center, but they also go to great lengths to deceive others. Because they refuse to acknowledge their evil to therapists, they are difficult to heal.
An exorcism is an attempt to persuade the evil person to display his evil face. Even if we deny the existence of the supernatural, we can value exorcism as a therapeutic investigation. Atheists may not care for the religious arguments in this book, but evil is a serious problem that is rarely acknowledged by atheists. Ayn Rand, of course, is a notable exception.
Peck argues that it is a mis-reading of Christianity to believe that we should not judge others. Instead, Peck says that Jesus taught that we should first judge ourselves, before we judge others, and that when we do judge others, we should do so carefully. Peck also says that we should heal evil people by loving them. This reviewer cannot follow the author that far; it seems to me that every hour spent loving an evil person is an hour that should have been spent loving a good person.

Some of this is good stuff, with clinical vignettes that create affection for the lost and nearly-lost patients. But eventually he does a weird multi-page bellyflop in which he explicitly equates "autism" with "narcissism." It's just a usage problem, but it's a big and easily avoidable one. Next he's got a chapter about demonic possession and exorcism, complete with logical porkers like the observation that statistics show a high correlation between religious belief and "possession." Like the correlation between being interested in sports and knowing sports stories, I guess.

I got through 80% of this book and then gave myself permission to toss it.

Evil fascinates me. It operates throughout our society largely unnoticed by people who fail to identify it (not as easy as you may think it to be), or by optimistic people who would like to think it does not exist. While Peck doesn't get in detail about the two exorcism he partook in, he clearly identifies evil on three different levels. This book really opens your eyes to the psychology of evil, the shadows, and the real possibility of demons. I recommend this book to anyone, even though I picked it up more for research.

Christian fundamentalist propaganda interspersed with Bible verses and prayer-like mentally confused pseudo-psycho babble that has no place in actual psychology and science. "Evil" is not a valid diagnosis and people with personality disorders are not demonically possessed or out to "do the devil's work."
There may not be treatment as of yet for certain diagnoses but that does not mean we should lazily cast compassion and motivation for continuous studying and trying to find a solution overboard.
This book is not "dangerous" as the author initially suggests in it because "evil people" may learn from it and use it against "good" (aka his God's) people but because it is basically a low key call to violence. Where do you send evil people? Right back to hell where they belong with their demon overlord Satan, right? I must consider the author to be very mentally ill due to his hateful propaganda and would class this book with others of its kind such as Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" for example. And no, I am not kidding. It is THAT bigoted - and more.
I'm not a fan of burning books but this one certainly qualifies. If you want to make any use of this book use it as toilet paper or trash can lining.

The premise of this book, which is an attempt by Scott Peck to bridge the gap between psychology and theology, but the results are seriously mixed.

The early chapters on defining and identifying evil were very good, and they really made me reflect on and rethink the way I conceive of virtue and character.
I had always thought that only actions were good or evil, that people were neither. But having read People of the Lie, I see now that that’s an incomplete world view. I still believe that people are neither inherently good nor inherently evil, but now I’ve realised that over the course of lives, we become one or the other through our choices.

Peck’s characterisation of evil as – to paraphrase – everything that opposes life, both of the body and of the spirit, was also very helpful, although more in terms of self-examination than diagnosing others. And strangely the part of the book that I was most wary of – the use of exorcisms as a cure for psychological evil – was probably the most even-handed section. He doesn’t prescribe exorcisms as a cure all, and he even refrains from making definite statements about the success of the two exorcisms he witnessed: both patients improved afterwards, but gradually. In actual fact, the attempts initially seemed to have failed. Non-believers who had taken part in the rituals reported no spiritual or supernatural experiences – there is room for the incredulous here.

However, I do think that it’s a book that needs to be taken with a double helping of salt. For one thing, Peck is a Freudian. I didn’t know that anyone apart from irritating literary theorists took Freud seriously these days, but this book casually throws out Freudian theories of psychosexual development as though they were valid and applicable. It was pretty left of field.

However, I think most people can spot Freudian BS without being taken in by it, because it’s just so ludicrous. The more concerning part is Peck’s lax attitude towards theology – he presents theories about heaven and hell and good and evil without any reference to Scripture, tradition or the writings of the Church’s many fathers and doctors. He makes enormous sweeping statements, apparently on his own authority. It’s just impossible to trust that kind of approach.

He also plainly misrepresented some historical events, especially as regards the historical process of the academic separation of theology and science. In one offhand paragraph, he dismissed an enormously complex ideological shift that took place over hundreds of years, attributing the schism instead to the Church’s mishandling of Galileo, an incident which has itself been misrepresented in popular historical accounts. I was Fuming.

So, while frequently thought-provoking, this book is just too unreliable to be recommendable. It certainly hasn’t done anything to reduce my wariness of pop psychology in general.

I may be one of the few people who lived through the 1980s without ever reading anything by M. Scott Peck. His books were all over the place. His The Road Less Traveled became a bestseller and his brand of psychotherapy was well known. I read People of the Lie because it contributed, as I’ve noted elsewhere (Sects and Violence in the Ancient World), to the interest in demons that suddenly appeared in the years after The Exorcist. This book, however, was complex in a different way. Books about psychology often dredge up things from your past, but I was continually bothered by how freely Peck labeled people as “evil.”

I think I get what he was trying to do in the book—he wanted scientists and others to take evil seriously. In describing patients, mostly his own, he would point out where he thought they were evil (narcissistic or liars). Most of the people seemed like they were fairly normal folks, just trying to get along in the world. Of course, I wasn’t in the room at the time, but still, I tend to think most people are good and evil is a very strong word to use on others. I don’t think Peck was trying to be unkind, but still, evil?

The section on demons was understated, after all that. The material on My Lai was difficult to read. Nobody likes to be reminded how easily groups of people can be made to do what is truly called evil. This was one of those books that was fascinating and frustrating in turns. Peck’s overt advocacy of Christianity doesn’t prevent him from treating other religions with respect. It does, however, lead to some strangely contradictory outlooks. Because of Peck’s following his view on personified evil played into the spirit of the times, and, arguably continues to do so. Many years later he wrote a follow-up book on the exorcism cases he witnessed. I suspect I’ll read that one some day too.

Cartea asta e definiția termenului “mixed feelings” pentru mine. Poate că mi-ar fi plăcut mai mult dacă nu pretindea a fi “psihologia” minciunii.
Dacă vreți vreodată să citiți cartea, e important să știți că ea a fost publicată în 1983. Într-un fel sau altul, explicațiile și abordările folosite nu mai sunt valabile astăzi. Ăsta e motivul pentru care nu aș recomanda-o dacă nu sunteți deja familiari cu modul în care înțelegem astăzi diferite tulburări mentale (câteva din cele menționate de el fiind OCD, autismul și narcisismul).
În sine, e o lectură plăcută. Mai degrabă un eseu coerent și lung despre viziunea sa filosofică decât o carte de psihologie propriu-zisă. Include foarte multe din perspectivele sale psihanalitice și religioase. Personal nu m-au deranjat, dar e ceva inedit să urmărești cât de uimit și confuz e că terapia psihanalitică nu a dat nici un rezultat timp de 3 ani fără să se gândească măcar o dată că poate ar trebui să schimbe abordarea (de fapt, aici mint- ia în considerare ideea și ajunge la concluzia că răspunsul era …exorcismul)
Pe de altă parte, există câteva probleme majore. Ideea de la care pornește Peck este aceea că e singurul vizionar din domeniu care s-a gândit să abordeze problema moralității. Mi-e greu să cred asta când putem argumenta că psihologia chiar devenise obsedată de problema răului și a moralității la un moment dat (vezi Milgram, Zimbardo, Piaget și Kohlberg printre alții). Tot el ridică întrebarea: “De ce psihologia nu s-a concentrat pe studierea răului?”, la care își răspunde singur spre final fără să își dea seama- pentru că implică judecăți generale și subiective după evenimentul respectiv. Concluziile în știință trebuie să fie testabile, verificabile. Altfel, ne reîntoarcem în perioada în care psihologia funcționa strict pe principiul “sună plauzibil deci probabil așa și este”. Deci nu, nu putem generaliza și trage concluzii de tipul “era un om rău” la zeci de ani după eveniment (cum face autorul, de altfel) , și în același timp să pretindem că facem o evaluare obiectivă în numele științei.

Pe scurt, o puteți citi pentru meritul său filosofic și ideile pe care le expune (într-un mod clar și cu exemple utile), dar cam atât.

Scary, in that after reading this, I saw evil in a clearer light than before. And group evil is the worse form of all. Peck is a master at getting to the core of human psychology and explaining it in lay terms.

At times this book will scare you to death. He names human and cosmic evil as no ohe I have ever read.

I don't know why, each time I read this book, I get the desire to write a short story, a fictional novel, or a thriller series. Maybe because, unconsciously, I refuse to believe that the people "Scott Peck" is talking about are not real. It is a bit hard to admit they live everywhere around us. But, in fact, this is the truth: frustrated and mentally-disordered people are here, there and anywhere, and they can't be recognized easily. The writer says, in this book, that he meets psychopath people in parties and in the public life more than he does in his clinic.
I have two seperated opinions about this book:
First, I love his call to study the Evil neurologically and psychologically, and to make talking about it scientifically termed. But I expected he will be giving or suggesting any scientific hypothesis that give it the form of a serious theory. I loved the way he formulated the stories of his patients but I didn't discern their connection with his "theory". I just get informed about the problems of some people with some social deceases and with some bad influences.
Secondly, when he started talking about the Satan and his existence, as a man who went deep in the psychology field, I really felt like reading a fictional story. I don't think, as a reader in the twenty first century, that his participation in two excorsims rituals is enough to draw a conclusion on the facts of the demons' world. I guess that "M. Scott Peck" was was only telling us how he sees psychology in his christian perspective.
I agree with almost everyting said about the spiritual cure for humanity through love, but it wasn't enough for me, as a man who is seeking some deeper answers.

kötülüğün bir hastalık olduğunu vurgulayan bir kitap.

3.5

Mostly case studies. A bit long winded. Conclusions are the most valuable part of the book: confront and speak truth to the deceptions; but NEVER stop loving people. There are no guarantees that this will heal a person but it is the only hope.