People Of The Lie Mini Review

Just about finished reading M. Scott Peck's "People of the Lie". A few notes: a) the word "evil" is used a lot, but apart from seeing this as having aspects of narcissism, there is very little detailed and comprehensive explanation of what how it is defined. John Maquarrie, in his "Christian Theology", for instance, looks at evil in terms of different models - existence that is disordered, unbalanced, fallen (as a myth), etc, but Peck's theology is severely dualist, and his chapter on exorcism goes over the top, more like gnosticism than Christianity. His notions about the devil seem more at home in Dante! N.T. Wright's "Evil and the Justice of God" is far better on the theology. b) it is not clear how his use of the word "evil" actually helps in the case studies he presents, it seems more like an "add on", and suffers from over use. If you start to label all kinds of behaviour as "evil", there is a flattening out process, and the different spectrum of behaviour seems to be painted just one colour, black. c) he sails very close to the wind regarding professional ethics on occasion. I'm not too keen on his Freudian ideas, and the notion that the therapist must take the role of parent, the patient as child. I think Freud probably had control issues, and I wonder if Peck has. Has he not come across other types of therapy? His is presented as "the way". d) his use of the word "autistic" is bizarre, as he just uses it for any lack of empathy or consideration in relationships, Wasn't he aware of the body of literator on developmental disorders? Hadn't he even taken the trouble to read Kanner? e) His chapter on group evil is probably one of the best, but it suffers from too much generalisation from one event, which obviously made an impression on him, and has also been done better by a recent New Scientist (with only one mention of the word "evil" in the article. It was not a book I came away with feeling I had really learned much.