The cult of the therapeutic
America was suffering a severe case of the spiritual blahs when the first 5,000 copies of M. Scott Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled” rolled off the press in 1978. The reasons weren’t hard to grasp: Oil shocks. A failed Southeast Asian war. Grand social experiments discarded or discredited. Soaring inflation. A president driven from the White House in disgrace. To that dismal list you could add silly clothes and breathtakingly inane pop tunes.
Many in the country felt distrustful and dispirited, yet too weary to begin the arduous task of reversing what President Carter termed the national “malaise.” Such a cultural impasse cried out for a healer, a prophet, and into this wilderness strode Morgan Scott Peck, a 40-year-old Harvard-educated psychiatrist with a rigorous intellect, a flair for penning pithy sentences and his index finger squarely on the pulse of the national zeitgeist.
Like Soren Kierkegaard, Peck sensed a sickness in the Western soul and set out to propose a cure. In his briskly written book, subtitled “A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth,” he laid out not only a prescription for individual mental health but also a template for what he implied could be a national spiritual and moral reawakening. Arguing that humanity’s last, best hope lay in love, which he formulated as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth,” Peck urged his countrymen to face their personal and collective demons head on, rather than try to skate past them.
He offered no quick fixes or placebos, no “I’m OK-You’re OK” mental-health consolation prize. Instead he argued that we must adhere to an endlessly painful and challenging, yet ultimately rewarding, path of self-scrutiny, honesty and spiritual vigilance. Mankind’s “original sin,” Peck postulated in almost preacherly cadences, was “laziness,” the obstinacy or lack of courage that prevented individuals from owning up to their obligations to themselves and others. The “tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness,” he wrote.
Quoting everyone from T.S. Eliot and Eldridge Cleaver to John Denver and citing the My Lai massacre and the Watergate cover-up, Peck warned that denying the truth and clinging to “outdated maps” of reality is the bane of nations no less than of individuals.
“The Road Less Traveled,” which is being re-released this month in a 25th anniversary edition, showcased Peck’s Freud-like capacity to cull and synthesize ideas from a variety of areas (art, history, mythology), make anecdotal use of his patients’ case histories and write in a way that is both eloquent and entertaining.
But his book stood out from the throng of ‘70s touchy-feely self-help manuals for a more controversial reason. In the second half of “The Road Less Traveled,” Peck sought to advance his thesis beyond psychology into theology. While acknowledging a link between an austere, guilt-ridden religious upbringing and certain forms of psychopathology, he asserted that the quest for self-awareness led inexorably toward God -- or at least to the desire to forge a relationship with a more “personal” God.
By nurturing spiritual growth in ourselves and others, he wrote, we are instinctively reaching toward the divine. Only by striving to emulate God’s higher state of being could we hope to overcome the laziness and delusions that make us slaves to Satan.
For Peck, these Judeo-Christian personifications weren’t merely metaphors. “We must ultimately belong either to God or the devil,” he wrote in a phrase that must have raised a few of his colleagues’ eyebrows.
A student of Zen Buddhism who later would convert to nondenominational Christianity, Peck wanted to take a sledgehammer to the wall dividing Reason from Spirituality, a barrier dating from the 18th century Enlightenment that towered over American liberal thought in the post-World War II period. “This beginning possibility of unification of religion and science is the most significant and exciting happening in our intellectual life today,” Peck enthused.
A spiritually malnourished American public gobbled up Peck’s prescriptions like peanut butter protein bars. “The Road Less Traveled” has sold millions of copies worldwide, been translated into at least 20 languages and set a longevity record for paperbacks on the New York Times bestseller list, while earning Peck the title of “national shrink.” It also has spawned numerous sequels, including “People of the Lie” and “The Road Less Traveled and Beyond.” Building on word of mouth, the book got a major boost from Alcoholics Anonymous and Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant churches. Publishing sales figures show it’s been a big mover in the Bible Belt.
Through the prism of the past quarter-century, “The Road Less Traveled” can be seen as a bridge between the neo-Romantic, consciousness-raising experiments of the ‘60s and ‘70s and the Christian fundamentalist revivalism of the conservative Ronald Reagan era. It straddled a cultural fault line that separated breezy heal-thyself guides from the brainy chastisements of books like Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism” (which prompted Carter’s “malaise” remark). Though demanding, Peck’s gospel was as brimming with hope as an Emerson essay, as full of American can-do attitude as a Super Bowl halftime show.
So how does “The Road Less Traveled” stand up in these renewed days of national soul-searching? In a way, Peck’s book has always been two books. The first, a compassionate but no-nonsense program for cultivating adult mental health, is itself a composite: a parenting guide, a primer on sexuality and love and an informal list of hints for therapists-in-training. Broken into short, digestible sections, like the book as a whole, it can be dipped into piecemeal but deserves a thorough reading.
Today, the main problem with this first book is its sprinkling of outdated assumptions. Peck posits a world of traditional gender-based roles and significantly less sexual freedom for women than exists today. But on the whole, this is a reasoned, humane and jargon-free appraisal of the human condition that still contains many good, useful ideas.
So does the “second” book, provided you can handle the abrupt turn Peck makes into religion, which for many readers is the book’s greatest strength. What’s intellectually disconcerting is that, while attempting to raise his analysis to the realm of theology, Peck continues to explain things in straightforward psychological terms. He has “come to conclude that evil is real,” he tells us. Yet he conceives of the devil, in essence, as simply the human tendency to avoid unpleasant truths. Nothing about pitchforks or hellfire everlasting. Do we really need a literal Satan to make sense of our psychological shortcomings? What sort of God we do need is a bigger question that, to its credit, “The Road Less Traveled” doesn’t insist on answering definitively. What it does insist on is that psychotherapists should treat their patients’ religious beliefs respectfully and carefully and that no great myth -- psychoanalysis included -- can afford to omit God from the equation.
Peck’s need to elevate psychology to the level of religion seems traceable, in part, to a perceptible queasiness about human sexuality. Falling in love, he suggests, is really nothing more than “genetically determined” lust. Oh, really? At times Peck can sound more like Mr. Spock than Dr. Spock -- a bit knowing and imperious, like a higher being who has beamed down to Earth to lecture us less-evolved creatures chomping our red meat and clutching our false gods.
But although a single flawed theorem can doom an entire mathematics treatise to uselessness or, worse, harmfulness, that’s happily less true of a treatise on love and God (if you don’t believe it, go reread “The Divine Comedy”). Despite its rough patches, “The Road Less Traveled” is a wise, provocative and generous book, still well worth the price of the journey.
