This is an eye-opening book if you’re ever been narcissistically abused. Highly recommended.

As I said in one of my updates, this is one of the most chilling books I've ever read. Yet, it's also one of the most important.

Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck is the first person to really look at evil from a scientific perspective. He ultimately concludes that evil is a combination of malignant narcissism and intellectual laziness, which he makes clear from the beginning of the book. The rest of the book shows some of the cases he used to reach that conclusion -- and not just individual cases, but also examples of group evil like Nazi Germany and the MyLai massacre.

What made this book simultaneously disturbing and fascinating was how insidious evil could look, from parents who deliberately ignore a child's needs and feelings because of how society might perceive *them,* to people who see nothing wrong with "othering" people and even murdering them without thinking they've done a single thing wrong.

I also saw the actions of far too many modern-day right wing politicians reflected in the words of this book; at the end of the day, that's what disturbed me the most.

Excellent book...but definitely deep. M. Scott Peck was a world renowned psychiatrist best known for his work The Road Less Traveled. People of the Lie could be deeply disturbing to some so read with caution. It gives great insight into human evil. The pseudo case histories he gives gave me chills. It was a hard book to read for sure. But I feel as if I have walked away with a better understanding of some things that troubled me. I feel lighter somehow, as if I laid down a burden I have carried a long time at the feet of Jesus. I have been changed by reading this book and isn't that what a good book is supposed to do?

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.

Peck became famous for his book on psychology and the human journey The Road Less Traveled. In this volume, using case histories, he deals with the uncomfortable region of the human capacity for evil. There was a sequel as well. Significant.

This was the first book about evil people I read and ten years later I decided to read it again. It doesn't fare well a second time. What I've understood about evil is that it is related to the condition of psychopathy or sociopathy or antisocial personality disorder. These are scientific terms describing a whole host of 'evil' traits listed by Dr Robert Hare: lack of conscience, empathy, grandiosity, scapegoating, lying etc. There are a number of far better reads like The Sociopath Next Door, Snakes In Suits, Without Conscience, etc which give a more scientific understanding of the problem. This book by contrast is subjective while pretending to be objective and I found myself disliking the author quite a bit. In his sessions with 'Charlene' I began rooting somewhat for his patient in their contest and felt her frustration with dealing with such a dork! Why did he continue therapy for so many years with her? Sorry, not for ethical reasons and helping a patient but because he was getting paid. The chapter on posession was where I bailed out this time around.

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.

This is a weird book. I found about half of it literally unreadable - my eyes and mind would not stay focused on the first chapter (the story of "George" and his pact with the devil), or the chapters about possession/exorcism and about My Lai as an example of "group evil". The conclusion is wishy-washy and unhelpful... after spending several hundred pages arguing that some people are so heartless, so lacking in empathy, so self-centered, so deceitful and self-deceiving that their narcissism reaches the level of "evil," he speculates that they can only be healed by sacrificial love. But the book hasn't offered much hope for that being possible, or remotely safe for a would-be healer.

On the other hand, the chapters where he explored the affect and psychology of Evil were extremely persuasive. (He admits that his "Evil" is very similar to Erich Fromm's "malignant narcissism," and he quotes Fromm a lot, so maybe I should read that book next.) But his descriptions of conversations with people he diagnoses as "evil" are scarily recognizable, and I think the constellation of traits he describes are right-on ... the absence of empathy, the rage at being contradicted, the chronic lying, deceit, manipulation, and evasion.

It also helped me a lot that he worked through the false opposition of "evil or just sick?" Basically he concludes that evil is a mental illness (the ultimate "personality disorder") and that the appropriate question is "Just sick, or sick AND evil?"

One last gripe: I found it frustrating that the book is written by a psychotherapist for other psychotherapists. One of his core arguments is that therapists should develop scientific methods for diagnosing, studying, and treating Evil. Which is fine. But I would have appreciated a section or chapter addressed to readers entangled in relationships with evil people. The cases he described all ended with refusal or failure of therapeutic treatment. The best outcome he could give was a sort of "deus ex machina" where he, the therapist, was able to pull a child-victim out of an evil parent's range of influence.

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.

This book was so lame... I was hoping to read about SCIENCE, not demons and God. I just couldn't continue when he started with the exorcism bullshit!

I couldn’t put this book down, and it was for all the wrong reasons. Scott Peck is/was a psychologist (not sure if he’s still alive as this book is older), and if you ever encounter a psychologist or therapist like him, please run for the hills. A friend recommended this book because I’m interested in books about the idea of evil, and I was not prepared for this book. The first two-thirds of this book is just stories of his patients and showing his bad practices and unethical behavior. To summarize his views, his patients are good people but toxic people in their lives are evil. No nuance. No empathy or compassion for the toxic people and what they may have gone through and the fact they probably need therapy to. Just a label that they’re evil. Not only that, he tries to convince his patients that these people are evil. Even when a patient acknowledges they need boundaries because they’re dealing with a sick person and must distance themselves, Peck pushes the idea on the patient that these people are just evil.

Finally, in the last part of the book, it gets really good as the author's religious views come pouring out. In this section, he discusses “real” supernatural evil. I’m talking people being possessed by the devil and other demons. And the only thing that made this part more hilarious is that he ties in the controversial diagnosis of DID aka multiple personality disorder.

I binged this book all the way through because it was pure insanity from start to finish. So, if you want a playbook on what not to do as a psychologist or therapist, this book is for you. And if you want to know what type of psychologists or therapists to avoid, grab a copy of this book. But to give it a little credit, there is a bit about people who are probably legit psychopaths, sociopaths or narcissists, but the book’s so short, it’s hard to get a solid read on the people he discusses.

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.