Published in 1990, this book of psychiatry sold six million copies. Mine was bought this year for £1.50 from a second-hand store, and it has changed my understanding of life.
For the better, I think! I was concerned with the question of where do we find love – for our friends and family and others who need it? And what is love – beyond sexual passion and the parental bond? As a male I had been taught to fulfil my obligations – but where was the feeling?
Scott Peck gives a really interesting answer. He begins by saying life is hard. True love for yourself lies in doing the hard work of increasing your self-awareness and uncovering the truth that’s buried in your unconscious. He calls this fostering your spiritual growth.
He concludes that true love for your partner, child or friend is fostering their spiritual growth or personal development.
Scott Peck has many convincing anecdotes from his career as a psychiatrist showing that truths that are too hard to confront and stay buried in our unconscious memory can imprison us in repeated patterns of neurotic or self-destructive behaviour.
Parenting is seen as crucial. We need to be attentive to our child, give them time and listen to them. But also to use appropriate, careful discipline to teach them what is acceptable.
To escape the prison of poor mental health, we must accept the fact that life requires work and effort. If we lack patience and have been allowed by bad parenting to continually seek immediate gratification, we are likely to become addicted to things that are harmful for us and destructive life patterns.
By dealing with the frightening things in our unconscious mind, and confronting our fear of abandonment and death, we can be freed to be thankful for the world we are in here and now. Since we are the product of millions of years of evolution through different natural species, spending time in nature has a simple healing and reviving effect. A thankful attitude for what’s here in the present will help us to avoid depression and pointless anxiety.
Scott Peck warns us that it’s harmful to rush through life, always trying to achieve our next desire or goal. Give each thing and action its due time. Learn patience. (To which I would add, give up some of the demands of your ego to accomplish its will, at all costs. That dooms you to frustration.)
Some of the underpinning of this theory comes from the Swiss father of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung. To me it was a revelation that a “religious” understanding of morality and our place in nature and the cosmos could be described in psychiatric terms. Spiritual and emotional healing, for ourselves or our family, no longer needs to be based on a magical, perfectionist dogma at odds with science.
S B