Doktor beye çok katılmasam da kötülük gibi bir konuyu psikolojik açıdan ele alabilme çabası okumaya değerdi.

I took from this what I wanted and left the rest. (The exorcism bit seemed to wonder off on another tangent)
A must read for anyone who has ever been played or victimised by someone with NPD. The gas lighting, triangulation and deviousness of these pathologicals is illustrated by the victims reactions from having engaged with them. It is life changing for victims to read this book and realise - "It wasn't me"
The only thing that confounded me was Pecks hope for redemption for these people. But, on second thought I suppose he had to or it would make him and his entire profession redundant to a rather large group of patients.(less)

"Eğer kişi kötülüğü kalbine alırsa nasıl hala iyi kalabilir? Kötülük bile yenilgi ye uğratılabildiğine göre iyilik nasıl ayakta kalacaktır? Geriye anlamsız bir değiş tokuştan başka ne kalacaktır?
Bunu ancak mistik bir dille açıklayabilirim. Tek söyleyebileceğim gizemli bir şekilde kurbanın kazanan olacağı. C.S.Le-wis’in söylediği gibi: “Bir hainin yerine gönüllü bir kurban öldürülürse, Masa çatlar ve Ölüm geriye gitmeye başlar.”
Bunun nasıl meydana geldiği konusunda bir bilgim yok ama bu gerçeğin bilincindeyim. İyi insanların başkalarının kendileri ne kötülük yapmalarına hatta bir bakıma öldürülmelerine izin verdiklerini biliyorum ama buna rağmen hala hayatta kalıp kontrolü ellerinde tutabiliyorlar. Bunun gerçekleştiği her seferde dünyanın güç dengesinde küçük de olsa bir değişiklik olur."

I am finding this book a fascinating read (which totally surprised my daughter, since I'm not much given to reading psychology books!) But in light of experiences in my life over the past year, it has helped me to wrap my mind around how people you loved and thought you knew can change in ways you never imagined. It even covers how groups of people can come to accept and tolerate evil in their midst. I don't agree with all the author says (of course!) and have some additional ideas as well, but I would highly recommend this book to anyone whose life has been affected by people who lie....to themselves and others.

Peck asserts that evil is a personality trait that can be diagnosed clinically. He is smart enough to realize on some level the fundamental absurdity of this assertion, and so (sigh) the book equivocates on this point endlessly. Adding to the static is a confusion between human evil and supernatural evil, complete with a glowing gloss-over of his observation of two exorcisms.

Considered out of the context of the rest of this drivel, the chapter "MyLai: An Examination of Group Evil" is insightful and worth reading.

There are some people who have great difficulty dealing with evil in their life. Some people even prefer to deny that there is such a thing as evil. M. Scott Peck states clearly that: “... we are all in combat against evil.” This book has helped me an awful lot to deal with evil. When faced with evil I used to become very angry. I used to have great difficulty dealing with anger. This book deals with many aspects of evil in ways that I find very helpful and practical. M. Scott Peck utilizes several actual case studies to illustrate his points. He also deals with such subjects as: Possession and exorcism. An examination of group evil. As well as the dangers presented by evil, in its many form. He makes me feel that there may be real hope to overcome evil in our lives.

This is a much needed work, and good armor for anyone who works in the helping professions or deals with the public. Although I am not a Christian, I found Peck's arguments for the existence of evil compelling and his descriptions of his encounters of evil people certainly rang a bell with me.

Peck was one of the most brilliant and insightful writers in the psychology field for a long time, and all of his books do an excellent job of explicating difficult concepts in a way that the lay person can understand.

A fascinating and riveting work on human evil. I was most interested in the case studies that formed the bulk of the first half of the book, and far less interested in the theoretical application of group psychology that formed the last half. The case studies in the book could well describe someone you know. I appreciated the honesty of Peck regarding his feelings about his patients. I could well relate to his frustration and revulsion, it gave his accounts more verisimilitude.

I remain unconvinced of Peck's identification of evil with a specific form of personality disorder. While the people he describes certainly were evil, albeit of a mundane, domestic variety, I found the definition flat and truncated. It just seemed to be missing something. I found it very interesting that Peck thinks that Augustine's idea of evil as an absence of good has been discarded, when in fact it remains a part of Aristotelian philosophy and Thomistic philosophy and theology in this day. It is even more surprising given that his attempt to define evil as disease is a subset of the idea that evil is a privation.

The attempt to explain the group psychology behind the MyLai massacre was ultimately unconvincing, but it did remind me of the mimetic theory of Rene Girard, specifically the necessity of a scapegoat for group cohesion. However, on the terms of Peck's argument, what I found remarkable was that so few massacres occurred. His analysis made the events seem inevitable, so the real question becomes not why MyLai happened, but why there weren't hundreds more MyLais.

Overall a very interesting read. One of the most notable insights of this book is nicely summed up by the reviewer who brought my attention to this book, the late John J. Reilly. "The people whose cases Peck describes were seriously sick and hated their sickness, but they could not get better because in some fundamental sense they had chosen to be that way." A psychological insight with shades of Dante.

Dr. Peck believes that evil is a form of mental illness. He defines evil "as the use of power to destroy the spiritual growth of others for purpose of defending and preserving the integrity of our own sick selves. In short, it is scapegoating." He also believes that narcissism and laziness are the roots of all evil. In an evil personality type the main defect is the ability to recognize sin in themselves and they lie to themselves to keep from seeing it. They also tend to judge others as evil. Decent people are naturally revolted by evil. Adults who become involved in a relationship with someone who is evil do so because of their own evil. The way to overcome evil is by love.
Dr Peck rejects the Augustinian notion of evil as the absence of goodness and I think this is where Dr Peck goes wrong. He seems to reject this notion because of his belief in a literal form of demonic possession.

This book left me thinking, "Um... so I'm evil. Dang it." But by forcing me to confront that reality, the book made me a better person. I became more reliant on Jesus Christ as my Savior, and I became much more sensitive to how I affect other people's abilities to reach self-actualization. This is one of maybe a half-dozen secular books that have drastically changed my life for the better.

"Evil can be conquered only by love." "To somehow be tolerant and intolerant." "An almost Godlike compassion is required."

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"Okay George, I'm going to say a few things to you and I want you to listen to them well. Because they are very important. Nothing is more important."

"You have a defect--a weakness--in your character, George. It is a very basic weakness, and it it the cause of all the difficulties we've been talking about. It's the major cause of your bad marriage. It's the cause of your symptoms, your obsessions and compulsions."

"Basically George, you are a kind of coward. Whenever the going gets a little bit rough, you sell out. When you're faced with the realization that your're going to die one of these days, you run away from it. You don't think about it, because it's 'morbid.' When you're faced with the painful realization that your marriage is lousy, you run away from that too. Instead of facing it and doing something about it, you don't think about that either. And then because your've run away from these things that are really inescapable, they come to haunt you in these form of your symptoms, your obsessions, and compulsions These symptoms could be your salvation, You could say, "These symptoms mean that I'm haunted. I better find out what these ghosts are, and clean them out of my house.' But you don't say that, because that would mean really facing some things that are painful.. So you try to run away from your symptoms, too. Instead of facing them and what they mean, you try to get rid of them. And when they're not so easy to get rid of, you go running to anything that will give you relief no matter how wicked or evil or destructive.

You plead you shouldn't be accountable... because it was [done] under duress. Of course it was [done] under duress. Why else would one do that, except to rid oneself of some kind of suffering?... The question is not duress. The question is how people deal with duress. Some withstand it and overcome it, ennobled. Some break and sell out. You sell out, and I must say, you do it rather easily.

Easily. Easy. That's a key word for you, George. You like to think of yourself as easygoing. Joe Cool. And I suppose you are easygoing, but I don't know where you're going easy, except into hell. You're always looking for the easy way out, George. Not the right way. The easy way. Where you're faced with a choice between the right way and the easy way, you'll take the easy way every time. The painless way. In fact, you'll do anything to find the easy way out, even it if means selling your soul.

As I said, I'm glad you're feeling guilty. If you didn't feel bad about taking the easy way out, no matter what, then I wouldn't be able to help you... If you're willing to face the painful realities of your life--your terrorful childhood, your miserable marriage, your mortality, your own cowardice--I can be of some assistance. And I am sure that we will succeed. But if all you want is the easiest possible relief form pain, then I expect you are the devil's man, and I don't see any way to help you. "


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"The feeling that a healthy person often experiences in a relationship with an evil one is revulsion. The feeling of revulsion may be almost instant if the evil encountered is blatant. If the evil is more subtle, the revulsion may develop only gradually as the relationship with the evil one slowly deepens. The feeling of revulsion can be extremely useful to the therapist. It can be a diagnostic tool par excellence. It can signify more truly and rapidly than anything else that the therapist is in the presence of an evil human being."

"Revulsion is a powerful emotion that causes us to immediately want to avoid, to escape, the revolting presence, And that is exactly the most appropriate thing for a healthy person to do under ordinary circumstances when confronted with an evil presence: to get away from it. Evil is revolting because it is dangerous. It will contaminate or otherwise destroy a person who remains too long in its presence. Unless you know very well what you are doing, the best thing you can do when faced with evil is to run the other way. The revulsion counter-transference is an instinctive or if you will, a God-given and saving early-warning radar system." p65

"There is another reaction that the evil frequently engender in us: confusion. Describing an encounter with an evil person, one woman wrote, it was "as if I'd suddenly lost my ability to think." Once again, this reaction is quite appropriate. Lies confuse. The evil are "people of the lie" deceiving others as they also build layer upon layer of self-deception. "

"While evil people are to be feared, they are also to be pitied."

"It is a thesis of this book that evil can be defined as a specific form of mental illness..."

"It is not their sins per se that characterize evil people, rather is 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."

"The words "image," "appearance," and "outwardly" are crucial to understanding the morality of evil. While they seem to lack any motivation to BE good, they intensely desire to appear good. Their "goodness" is all on a level of pretense. It is, in effect, a lie. This is why they are, the "people of the lie."

"Actually, the lie is designed not so much to deceive others as to deceive themselves. They cannot or will not tolerate the pain of self-reproach...Because they are such experts at disguise, it is seldom possible to pinpoint the maliciousness of the evil. The disguise is usually impenetrable. "

"It is my experience that evil seems to run in families." (80)

"There is, I suspect, something basically incomprehensible about evil. But if not incomprehensible, it is characteristically inscrutable. The evil always hide their motives with lies."

"If one wants to seek out evil people, the simplest way to do so is to trace them from their victims. The best place to look, then, is among the parents of emotionally disturbed children or adolescents. I do not mean to imply that all emotionally disturbed children are victims of evil or that all such parents are malignant persons. The configuration of evil is present only in a minority of these cases. It is, however, a substantial minority."

"Evil was defined as the use of power to destroy the spiritual growth of others for the purpose of defending and preserving the integrity of our own sick selves."(199)

It may be that the parents described were not themselves suffering, but their families were. And the symptoms of family disorder--depression, suicide, failing grades, --were attributed to the leadership. The suffering of the children was a symptom of the sickness of the parents."

"The relationship between evil and schizophrenia is not only a matter for fascinating speculation but also very serious research. Many (but certainly not all) of the parents of schizophrenic children seem to be ambulatory schizophrenics or evil or both."

"Wherever there is evil, there is a lie around." (135)

"Theirs is a brand of narcissism so total that they seem to lack, in whole or party, this capacity for empathy."

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This book was pivotal in my understanding of the part that I played in my past demise. Mr. Peck has excellent focus on childhood and how parents are far more important within the development of their children then some realize. It was in this book that Mr. Peck stated, “In The Road Less Traveled I defined mental health as “an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.” Reality, something that exist and that neither positive nor negative, is essential to understand whether we are religious or not. From this book, I walked away with this understanding,

"As individuals, being aware of our own personal failures and owing up to them, keeps us from allowing the negative aspects of us get out of hand. They rarely manifest, and we do not make excuses for them. Those who are prideful and refuse to accept that they have personal failures, harm people all the time. Even when on the surface their intentions appear good. Intentions don’t excuse outcome. You could have good intentions toward someone and still end up doing a great amount of harm to them. The reasoning behind why you are doing what you are doing in no way justifies your actions anymore than someone who set out to actually do harm to someone. The outcome can be the same regardless of the intentional outset."

Anyone who has had a rough upbringing or past, understand, this book will show you that you play a vital part in your own victimhood. It doesn't seem like it at first, but when you realize that people will deal with you based on how you present yourself and what you allow, then it will become clear to you.