The People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil by M. Scott Peck

Author:M. Scott Peck [Peck, M. Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448106684
Publisher: Random House
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

1 Good and Evil (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), p. 111.

2 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.

3 This parental unity will not be surprising to psychiatrists. When we examine cases of child battering, we find it to be the rule that both parents have been involved in the crime. Even in cases of repetitive father-daughter incest, we usually find some degree of collusion on the mother’s part. Once again, I do not wish to imply that all battering or incestuous parents are evil. I cite these phenomena only to illustrate the fact that both parents are almost always culpable in the creation of psychopathology in their children. Those who have read Sybil, by Flora Schreiber (Warner Books, 1974), will recall the truth of this principle.

4 Erich Fromm coined the term ‘incestuous symbiosis’ for one of the three components of the ‘syndrome of decay’, or evil character type. Although lacking the other components. Hartley was a fleshed-out, walking definition of incestuous symbiosis. It suggests that he entered into a submissive relationship with evil precisely because he was partially evil himself. It is true he was not entirely comfortable in his thralldom. Dimly aware that he was caught in a dreadful trap, he obsessed back and forth between the two easiest ways to extricate himself: to kill Sarah or to kill himself. But he was too lazy to even consider the one legitimate escape route open to him: the obvious, more difficult path of psychological independence.

5 Arrow Books, 1990.

6 See Abraham Maslow’s description of ‘self-actualized’ persons in his Motivation and Personality (Harper Bros., 1954).

7 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. Much has been written about the ‘schizophrenogenic’ parent, and usually an ambulatory schizophrenic or evil person is what is described. Does this mean that ambulatory schizophrenia is a variant of true schizophrenia and a simple genetic transmission is involved? Or is schizophrenia in the child the psychological product of its parents’ evil destructiveness? Might even evil itself have a genetic basis, as seems the case in most instances of schizophrenia? We do not know, nor will we know until the psychobiology of human evil has become the subject of much scientific research.

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