Book Review: People of the Lie

(This started out as a class paper titled The Mirror of Evil: A Feminist Reading of Scott Peck's "People of the Lie," long ago. It was later revised and posted on Associated Content. I still think the book is worth reminding people to read...and one section of it merits a careful critique.)



Title: People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil

Author: M. Scott Peck, M.D. (1936-2005)

Date: 1983

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Author's and estate's web page: www.mscottpeck.com

Psychiatrists are expected to diagnose people who do evil things as being "sick." We've learned to expect that a psychological study of Hitler will say less about the evil character of "Big Lies" than about how Hitler was punished for childhood misbehavior, how he reacted to the untimely deaths of the women he dated, or which drugs seem to have been included in "The Formula" his doctor gave him. [Historical note: although The Secret Diaries of Hitler's Doctor also appeared in 1983, I didn't find it for several years...updating this article beyond recognition has meant adding new data.]

In People of the Lie, Dr. Peck broke tradition by describing a handful of patients whose behavior, though inconspicuous, seemed to be motivated less by diseases or complexes than by an evil principle. In some of the shorter cases, it's easy to see where the hypothesis "The patient is evil" would have arisen. Parents who've avoided discussing their older son's suicide give the gun the older son used to their younger son, as a gift, when the younger son is having problems at school? Right. But then we come to a long, detailed story of a patient Peck calls Charlene, and although Charlene's behavior is obviously annoying, it's consistently hard for anyone, even Peck, to explain why he came to the conclusion that Charlene was evil.

Part of the problem is, of course, that details have to be blurred. We don't really know whether Charlene has ever done anything worse than annoying people. The story as it's published has to be read as a sort of short novel about a fictional woman, Charlene, who might even be based on more than one person, and a fictional man, Scott, who is based on only as much of Scott Peck as Scott Peck cares to disclose.

So as I read this section of the book, I felt challenged. Charlene is female, and a former child prodigy. I am both of those things. Scott is presented as neither in the story. Was it possible that I could understand something about Charlene that Scott overlooked?

Sure enough, although Charlene doesn't behave like any former child prodigy I know, she does things we've all been at least tempted to do.

Charlene is a vaguely discontented woman who seeks psychoanalysis, as fashionable women did in the late 1960s when this story must, according to internal evidence, begin. Though often told she's "gifted," she has consistently failed to use any of her "gifts" except the ability to make other people feel inferior. Her one accomplishment is to "give [people] the willies."

Child prodigies often do "give people the willies." To some adults a four-year-old reading aloud from the Journal of the American Medical Association is as disturbing as a dog doing it. In the 1970s some of us were lumped together with brain-damaged and physically deformed children for "special education." It was seriously proposed to some parents who complained that schools were boring their little child prodigies that those children's brains should be deliberately damaged so that the children would be more "normal" and less upsetting to others. Child prodigies may never develop any empathy for this revulsion, but we do learn to expect it. While most of us are blessed with enough supportive adult acquaintances that the memories of being branded "evil" and "unnatural" trouble us only in our very worst moods, it's likely that there are a few child prodigies who grew up without any emotional support from adults. Possibly they became comfortable with the idea that they were somehow meant to make others uncomfortable. Possibly Charlene is one of them.

Charlene has accepted the idea that she "is" evil. She's not interested in changing. She seeks out pleasure where normal people wouldn't find it, even if it's a healthy, understandable pleasure in weather that keeps other people indoors and gives her a chance to be alone on a city street. She makes a career out of petty, spiteful acts that never really harm but are meant to upset other people. This doesn't make her happy. How could it?

Unfortunately, although psychoanalysis brought happiness to some people, it was never intended to work for Charlene. Nor does it. Let us postulate that what would have satisfied Charlene was the kind of respect many people refused to give young women when Charlene was growing up. Psychotherapy is designed specifically not to respect people as they are, but to help people change. So it's not surprising that psychotherapy wouldn't help Charlene. Few if any people have ever been motivated to please or conform to those who've labelled them "evil." If you have not made a goal of sinking battleships, there's no inspiration to use gifts and talents that are described to you as "enough to sink a battleship."

Of course, there's no particular motivation for Scott to respect someone whose goal is to "give him the willies," either. However, psychoanalytical "regression" rituals seem particularly ill-suited if what Charlene really wants, and doesn't realize she can even ask for, is respect. Regression is supposed to help patients compensate for a felt deficiency of motherly love, but we're not shown any reason to imagine that Scott would be able to offer parental love to a child prodigy.

It's hard for all of us to acknowledge feelings of deep inferiority...as distinct from feelings of trivial, temporary inferiority, as when we congratulate the person who's beaten us at a game. Having worked in the U.S. Army, Scott must have forced himself to concede the superiority of some other people, but he refuses to acknowledge any inferiority to Charlene. He struggles vehemently against the idea that he and Charlene are even equal. When she includes him in a consideration of her "peer relations," he explodes: "You are not my peer. You can't hold even a menial job."

This focus on the employment history of a woman who would have been brought up to believe that women shouldn't need jobs, and who in fact can afford not to have a job, helps Scott avoid the two obvious facts: (1) he was not a child prodigy, and (2) he's not a woman.

So Charlene brings up the topic of breasts. Scott insists on interpreting any awareness of breasts as a Freudian oral fixation, making Charlene "a sick and hungry infant." He compulsively denies the reality that, to women who possess functional breasts, breasts are not an object of desire. They are also an asset that some people lack...and the idea that children should be obsessed with a part of the body that is usually concealed from them, while ignoring a part of the body on which they may still remember having depended for food, reveals a great deal about the unconscious insecurities of some male psychologists.

The fact that he can neither give birth nor nourish an infant ought to arouse awe throughout the conscious and unconscious layers of a man's mind. The fact that men kick and scream when anyone mentions this reality is, according to Freudian logic, proof that men are burdened with an unconscious sense of deep inferiority to women. Scott ought to remember that a vehement emotional reaction is supposed to be proof of the truth of any speculation about his unconscious thought processes.

But he doesn't, and Charlene escalates. She doesn't "fall in love" with Scott. She wants to pull down his vanity, and chooses the easiest, most obvious way for almost any woman to hurt and humiliate almost any man. Her blatant desire to dominate Scott, rather than love him and enjoy his body, is probably what allows him to resist her sexual advances.

There might be other reasons why Charlene would try to seduce happily married Scott, but on consideration they seem unlikely. Scott has a steady job, income, and pension...but we're told that this story takes place in a city with a military base, where Charlene should be able to find hundreds of single men with steady jobs, incomes, and pensions. Then there's the much nastier possibility that comes to mind when Charlene says, "I don't see why a child shouldn't have sex with its parents," but although we're left to speculate whether Charlene might have had sex with some sort of "father figure" as a teenager, it's hard to imagine a woman who had been molested as a child ever being so cheerful and "arch" about it.

Even if Scott were free to marry Charlene, professional ethics would make it inappropriate for him to sleep with her while he is employed as her psychoanalyst. But his way of doing so is all wrong. He reinforces Charlene's sense of alienation. He does not consider the possibility that Charlene needs to practice relating to him as friend to friend, sister to brother, or even mother to son. He is locked into the idea that he needs to begin by playing the father, and Charlene, with the malicious glee that seems to be her closest approach to pleasure, locks into the idea that she needs to convince him that he's an unfit father.

At this point, a feminist reading of People of the Lie leaves me feeling more uncomfortable with the character of Scott than with the character of Charlene. I do happen to believe that people can be influenced by an evil principle. Envy is a particularly mean and sneaking form of human evil, a tacky kind of evil people rarely let themselves confront and overcome. Scott may not need help more desperately than Charlene, but he's much less likely ever to admit his need, much less find his help.

How accurately has Dr. Peck revealed himself in this story? How significant is it that his other "evil" patients are either women or couples, never men? Even though many people had felt long before 1983 that psychology needed to acknowledge that love might not be all we need even to beat a nail-biting habit, is it safe to accept anyone's definition of evil as something that person can find only in people who are different from that person's self? People of the Lie further delighted Christian counsellors by conceding that the principles of good and evil might exist beyond the human psyche, that the unconscious mind might function as a "postman" channelling good and evil ideas into consciousness. Peck also confessed that he was comfortable with calling the good principle "he," but felt a need to call the evil principle "it." Very interesting. In real life Scott Peck was an admirable man in many ways, but in People of the Lie he demonstrates how he compromised his own personal growth by compulsively denying any awareness of the limitations of maleness.

Whatever Charlene's behavior toward other people may have been, her behavior in therapy comes across as merely ugly in the way a mirror image can be ugly. Charlene acts like a man: she claims no friends, hates her parents, admits no "weak, unmanly" emotions such as love, uses her intelligence to confuse and embarrass rather than enlighten others, wants to teach people lessons, wants to establish her "top" position before considering any "loving" behaviors (which, when considered, show no awareness of what the people to whom she concedes kindness might want or need), and goes so far as to "stalk" potential bedmates. Charlene also acts like a psychoanalyst: she deliberately confuses people, withholds information "until I think you're ready to know" the answer, and refuses to acknowledge any Higher Power than herself.

Although the men and the psychoanalysts Charlene acts like include role models other than Scott, who is comfortable with the idea of a Higher Power, in the end I'm convinced that Scott fails to understand Charlene's perfectly understandable behavior because to some extent it mirrors Scott's behavior.

Fictional characters are always incomplete. We don't know how Charlene relates to anyone but Scott, except that she looks at a more nervous patient in a way that alarms that patient. In real life, we know that anyone who thought rape was acceptable and didn't see why children shouldn't have sex with their parents, even in the 1960s, was likely to be Very Bad News...but a lot of people were saying those things in the 1960s, before feminists had reasserted the fundamental human right to personal boundaries.

Nevertheless, in relation to Scott, it's hard not to see Charlene as a good character, even an "angel" in the sense of a conveyor of potential enlightenment. Scott wants to call people to more perfect obedience to the good principle. His own obedience is not perfect. His lack of humility is a dangerous weak point through which his attempt to do good could be subverted by the evil principle.

It's comforting to read In Search of Stones, a later work, and realize that the real Scott Peck did grow in the direction of humility. It's tempting to wonder whether, against his will and without his knowledge, patients like Charlene may have helped him.



Both books are fairly easy to find for less than $5 online but, if you buy both of them here for $5 per book, $5 per package, + $1 per online payment, you might save a few bucks anyway. Four of Peck's regular books (you could throw in The Road Less Traveled and Further Along the Road Less Traveled, or maybe A World Waiting to Be Born) fit into one $5 package, for a total of $25 via postal money order to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, or $26 via Paypal to the address you get by e-mailing salolianigodagewi, as shown at the very bottom of the screen. Alternatively, you might add one or more books by living writers to the package and help this web site encourage authors with small payments on "Fair Trade Books."