‘Encountered Satan’ During Exorcisms : Psychiatrist Sees Evil as Form of Mental Illness

A Connecticut psychiatrist remembers how a friend of his mother’s once described him: “That was the little boy who was always talking about things he shouldn’t have been talking about.”

Dr. M. Scott Peck, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1958, is still at it.

Peck’s book, “People of the Lie,” describes how he participated in two exorcisms and twice encountered Satan. He says evil is a specific form of mental illness that scientists should be studying just as any other mental disease.

‘Dangerous Book’

The book, which has sold 300,000 copies, begins with the words: “This is a dangerous book.”

The chapter on the two exorcisms, while guarded, is dramatically descriptive, and Peck, in an interview at his lake-side white colonial home in New Preston, does not want to elaborate.

“You really had to be there to see it,” he says. “I said that in the book. It made me realize even further the inadequacy of words.”

Each exorcism was conducted by a team, he wrote. The first lasted four days, the second three. The first team included a bishop, a nun, a housewife, a psychologist, a layman and a retired physician. None had taken part in an exorcism before.

The second team included two psychiatrists, two psychologists, three lay people and a minister.

Since his book came out, Peck says, he has learned of three other psychiatrists who have participated in exorcisms.

1,000 Exorcisms Annually

Peck predicts that, within a decade, demonic possession will be a psychiatric diagnosis. He agrees with Malachi Martin, a specialist on exorcisms, that 1,000 exorcisms a year are conducted in the United States, in the dark of night without the church’s blessing.

Peck seems an unlikely exponent of exorcism. He grew up in privileged circles, had his very own Auntie Mame who, when he was 13, “plied me with champagne, caviar and cigarettes.”

Peck spent his summers with novelist John Marquand and always drew praise at Harvard for his writing skills. He got an M.D. degree from the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in 1963 and, until 1972, served in the U.S. Army as assistant chief of psychiatry and neurology consultant to the surgeon general. He retired as a lieutenant colonel and began devoting his time to private practice in Litchfield County, Conn.

Baptized in 1980

Peck’s philosophy was mostly Hindu, and he leaned toward the Eastern religions until he became a Christian in 1980. He was baptized in a nondenominational ceremony performed by a North Carolina Methodist minister in an Episcopal convent.

The psychiatrist is firm in his insistence that he encountered Satan. He described one possessed patient as actually becoming serpentine in appearance, with hooded eyelids, and the other as becoming so grotesque and inhuman that Peck, when he tried later in front of a mirror, was unable to contort his face into such a diabolic grimace.

“In the first case, we got rid of four different demons, each representing a particular lie,” he says. “After getting rid of these four, there only seemed to be two left, the demons of lust and hate. Those two were surprises to the team. The demons spoke in the third person. Whether that reflects something about demons’ reality, I don’t know, but it hid behind Jesus.”

At the end of the first exorcism, when a team member suggested the spirit must really hate Jesus, the patient replied, in what Peck describes as a silky, oily voice, “We don’t hate Jesus; we just test him.”

“This was an uneducated, untutored patient,” Peck said. “There’s no way this uneducated patient would have used that,” the biblical reference to Satan testing Jesus.

Risks of Exorcism

The former Army psychiatrist speaks of the personal and professional risks of the exorcisms, risks the entire team accepted. It is one of the reasons Peck will not identify them.

“Surprisingly, I have gotten no professional repercussions,” he said. “The psychiatrists and psychologists who wrote said they had used the word evil in their minds and felt guilty about it, and they were glad I had written the book.

“The psychological risks are far worse than the professional risks. There are risks in just seeing that kind of stuff. When the demons of confusion started, I just felt my brain had turned to scrambled eggs. I was able to protect myself through psychoanalytic training. I said, ‘My God, Scott, what’s happening to you?’ I went in a corner and got a yellow pad and took notes like a psychiatrist.”

Peck feels the chapter on exorcism has actually hurt the sale of the book.

“There are a lot of psychiatric disorders far more serious and difficult to treat than possession,” he says.

He is far more concerned with group evil, the threat of nuclear war, Americans’ lack of community, society’s specialization, the evolution of man toward his salvation.

Not a Guru

Peck, as a result of his first book--”The Road Less Traveled” which sold 1.5 million copies--has become something of celebrity, but not, he insists, a guru.

“If people want to touch my robes, I can send them to the source,” said Peck. “The people who come to my lectures and read my books don’t buy everything that Scott Peck has to say, and that’s what keeps them from becoming groupies.”

“The Road Less Traveled” was published in 1978 and got only one review, albeit a good one, by Phyllis Theroux. Slowly, through word of mouth, it became a best seller. The book integrates traditional psychiatry with religious beliefs. He suggests, for instance, that original sin was not the eating of the apple, but the laziness Adam and Eve displayed in not asking God why they should not partake of this forbidden fruit.

Today, Peck has all but discontinued his private practice and spends his time lecturing, giving workshops, preaching sermons and writing.

He also has just published his third book, “What Return Can I Make?” a collection of essays accompanying songs by Sister Marilyn, a nun.

Besides his lecture tour, Peck is trying to raise funds to start a foundation to teach Americans how to have a sense of community, a need he feels is missing in our lives.

“I’m now the highest paid shrink in the world,” laughs Peck, “but for the first time, I’m in the position of a beggar.”