M Scott Peck
(Filed: 28/09/2005)
M Scott Peck, who has died aged 69, was a psychiatrist and author of The Road Less Travelled, the ultimate self-help manual, which has sold some 10 million copies and which set a record for a nonfiction book by spending more than eight years on the New York Times bestseller list.
Its opening sentence, "Life is difficult", introduced a tome which argued, uncontentiously and sensibly, that human experience was trying and imperfectible, and that only self-discipline, delaying gratification, acceptance that one's actions have consequences, and a determined attempt at spiritual growth could make sense of it. By contrast, Peck himself was, by his own admission, a self-deluding, gin-sodden, chain-smoking neurotic whose life was characterised by incessant infidelity and an inability to relate to his parents or children. "I'm a prophet, not a saint," he explained in an interview earlier this year.
In 1983 he began a bid for the presidency in order to be "a healer to the nation", but was forced by health fears to abandon his ambitions. Recently he had written in Glimpses of the Devil (2005) about his experiences of conducting exorcisms and had embarked on a new career as a songwriter. The voice of God asked him to be objective about the merits of a song he had written on the subject of faithfulness. "I went into a sort of guided meditation and I imagined there were a million people around the globe, Japan, Ethiopia, Brazil, America, what not, all with headphones on listening to this thing and that their consensus would somehow be objective… I played it for the 62nd time and I said: 'Holy s***! It's not good. It's great.' "



Morgan Scott Peck was born on May 22 1936 in New York City, the son of a successful lawyer who later became a judge, but who, according to his son, was in denial about the fact that he was half-Jewish. Though it was a secular household, young Scott attended a Quaker day school and became fascinated by religion, becoming a Zen Buddhist at the age of 18. By his own account, he was a tiresomely brilliant child. Like all the others, his ambition was to write the Great American Novel.
After Middlebury College in Vermont, he proceed to Harvard, from which he graduated in 1958 in social relations. Despite his literary ambitions, he enrolled in a pre-med course at Columbia University, taking night classes and working at Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric division during the day. At that time, he took a dim view of psychiatry, and enrolled at Case-Western Reserve University at Cleveland, Ohio, aiming to become a general practitioner.
At Columbia, he had met Lily Ho, from Singapore; they were married during his first year of medical school. Both sets of parents disapproved, and Peck's father went so far as to disown him, though he later relented and paid his school tuition fees.
After graduation in 1963, Peck joined the US Army as a psychiatrist, this being the only way in which he could train while receiving a wage sufficient to support his wife and children. He had stints on Honolulu and in San Francisco before becoming head of psychology at the US Medical Centre at Okinawa from 1967 to 1970, and then assistant chief of psychiatry at the Surgeon General's office in Washington, DC, from 1970 to 1972.
He opposed the Vietnam war, but stayed in the military ("Maybe it was a cop-out, but I decided to be one of those people who work from within") until 1972, when he left in the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Peck moved to New Preston, Connecticut, working as a psychiatrist and, like many in his profession, spending an equal amount of time playing golf.
In 1976, however, he received an urgent inspiration to write a book which, 20 months later, he submitted to Random House under the title The Psychology of Spiritual Growth. His editor liked the first two sections, but thought the third "too Christ-y". Simon & Schuster picked it up for $7,500 and published it as The Road Less Travelled. At first it sold well, but not spectacularly; by 1980 it had been reprinted and sold 12,000 copies but, on its appearance in paperback, it became a word-of-mouth sensation. In 1983 it entered the bestseller lists, and stayed there for eight years. It was especially popular with members of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Peck, meanwhile, found himself drawn from Eastern mysticism to mainstream Christianity, though he remained unfaithful to his wife, maintained his drink and cigarette intake, and was liberal on issues such as euthanasia. "To me, religion and psychology are not separate," he told Playboy.
His next book, People of the Lie (1983), explored human evil. He was tiring, too, of his own patients, whom he thought "slow" and insufficiently attentive to him. He wound down his practice and set out on the lecture circuit, charging $15,000 a talk. He collaborated on Christian song sheets and, in 1987, published The Different Drum, which pointed out where communities were going wrong.
Latterly he suffered from impotence and Parkinson's Disease and devoted himself to Christian songwriting, at which he was not very good.
He married Lily Ho in 1959; they had three children, two of whom would not talk to their father. She left him in 2003. He is survived by his second wife, Kathy, an educationalist he picked up, while still married, after a lecture at Sacramento, and by his children.