Peck - The road less traveled: a New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

M. S COTT P ECK, M.D. , was a psychiatrist and bestselling author. Educated at Harvard (B.A.) and Case Western Reserve (M.D.), Dr. Peck served in administrative posts in the government during his career as a psychotherapist, and later in private practice as a psychiatrist. For more than two decades, he devoted much of his time and financial resources to the work of the Foundation for Community Encouragement, a nonprofit organization that he and his wife, Lily, helped found in 1984. He died in September 2005 at the age of 69.

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JACKET DESIGN BY MARY SCHUCK

JACKET ILLUSTRATION BY CATHIE BLECK

AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY LILY PECK

COPYRIGHT 2002 SIMON & SCHUSTER

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Copyright 1978 by M. Scott Peck
Preface copyright 1985 by M. Scott Peck
Introduction copyright 2002 by M. Scott Peck

Previously published in different format.

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First Touchstone ebook edition April 2012

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-1-4391-4485-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-5358-5 (ebook)

To my parents,

Elizabeth and David,

whose discipline and love

gave me the eyes

to see grace.

The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love,
Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

Tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Self Reliance

The most common response I have received to The Road Less Traveled in letters from readers has been one of gratitude for my courage, not for saying anything new, but for writing about the kind of things they had been thinking and feeling all along, but were afraid to talk about.

I am not clear about the matter of courage. A certain kind of congenital obliviousness might be a more proper term. A patient of mine during the books early days happened to be at a cocktail party where she overheard a conversation between my mother and another elderly woman. Referring to the book, the other woman said, You certainly must be very proud of your son, Scotty. To which my mother replied, in the sometimes tart way of the elderly, Proud? No, not particularly. It didnt have anything to do with me. Its his mind, you see. Its a gift. I think my mother was wrong in saying that she had nothing to do with it, but I think she was accurate that my authorship of The Road was the result of a gifton many levels.

One part of that gift goes way back. Lily, my wife, and I had made friends with a younger man, Tom, who had grown up in the same summer colony as I. During those summers I had played with his older brothers, and his mother had known me as a child. One night a few years before The Road was published, Tom was coming to have dinner with us. He was staying with his mother at the time, and the evening before he had said to her, Mom, Im going to have dinner tomorrow night with Scott Peck. Do you remember him?

Oh yes, she responded, he was that little boy who was always talking about the kinds of things that people shouldnt talk about.

So you can see that part of the gift goes way back. And you may also understand I was something of a stranger within the prevailing culture of my youth.

Since I was an unknown author, The Road was published without fanfare. Its astonishing commercial success was a very gradual phenomenon. It did not appear on the national bestseller lists until five years after its publication in 1978a fact for which I am extremely grateful. Had it been an overnight success I doubt very much that I would have been mature enough to handle sudden fame. In any case, it was a sleeper and what is called in the trade a word-of-mouth book. Slowly at first, knowledge of it spread by word of mouth by several routes. One of them was Alcoholics Anonymous. Indeed, the very first fan letter I received began: Dear Dr. Peck, you must be an alcoholic! The writer found it difficult to imagine that I could have written such a book without having been a long-term member of AA and humbled by alcoholism.

Had The Road been published twenty years previously, I doubt it would have been even slightly successful. Alcoholics Anonymous did not really get off the ground until the mid-1950s (not that most of the books readers were alcoholics). Even more important, the same was true for the practice of psychotherapy. The result was that by 1978, when The Road was originally published, a large number of women and men in the United States were both psychologically and spiritually sophisticated and had begun to deeply contemplate all the kinds of things that people shouldnt talk about. They were almost literally waiting for someone to say such things out loud.

So it was that the popularity of The Road snowballed, and so it is that its popularity has continued. Even toward the end of my career on the lecture circuit, I would tell my audiences: You are not an average cross section of America. However, there are striking things that you have in common. One is the remarkable number of you who have during the course of your lives undergoneor are still undergoingsignificant psychotherapy either within the Twelve Step programs or at the hands of traditional academically trained therapists. I doubt you will feel that I am violating your confidentiality when I ask all of you here who have received or are receiving such therapy to raise your hands.

Ninety-five percent of my audience would raise their hands. Now look around, I would tell them.

This has major implications, I would then continue. One of them is that you are a body of people who have begun to transcend traditional culture. By transcending traditional culture I meant, among other things, that they were people who had long begun to think about the kinds of things that people shouldnt talk about. And they would agree when I elaborated on what I meant by transcending traditional culture and the extraordinary significance of this phenomenon.

A few have called me a prophet. I can accept such a seemingly grandiose title only because many have pointed out that a prophet is not someone who can see the future, but merely someone who can read the signs of the times. The Road was a success primarily because it was a book for its time; its audience made it a success.