Front Matter (introduction and preface) The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

The Road Less Traveled

by M. Scott Peck

Introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition

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 book’s 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 didn’t have anything to do with me. It’s his mind, you see. It’s a gift.” I think my mother was wrong saying that she had nothing to do with it, but I think she was accurate my authorship of The Road was the result of a gift—on 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 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, I’m 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 shouldn’t 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 1978-a 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 book’s 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 shouldn’t talk about.” They were almost literally waiting for some-one 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 undergone-or are still undergoing-significant 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 shouldn’t 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.

My naive fantasy when The Road first came out twenty-five years ago was that it would be reviewed in newspapers throughout the nation. The reality was that, by pure grace, it received a single review . . . but what a review! For a significant part of the success of the book I must give credit to Phyllis Theroux. Phyllie, a very fine author in her own right, was also a book reviewer at the time and accidentally happened to discover an advance copy among a pile of books in the office of the book editor of The Washington Post. After scanning the table of contents she took it home with her, returning two days later to demand she be allowed to review it. Almost reluctantly the editor agreed, whereupon Phyllie set out, in her own words, “to deliberately craft a review that would make the book a bestseller.” And so she did. Within a week of her review The Road was on the Washington, D.C., bestseller list, years before it would get on any national list. It was just enough, however, to get the book started.

I am grateful to Phyllis for another reason. As the book grew in popularity, wanting to assure that I would have the humility to keep my feet on the ground, she told me, “It’s not your book, you know.”

Immediately I understood what she meant. In no way do either of us mean that The Road was the literal word of God or otherwise “channeled” material. I did the writing, and there are a number of places in the book where I wish I had chosen better words or phrases. It is not perfect, and I am wholly responsible for its flaws. Nonetheless, perhaps because it was needed, despite its flaws, there is no question in my mind that as I wrote the book in the solitude of my cramped little office I had help. I really cannot explain that help, but the experience of it is hardly unique. Indeed, such help is the ultimate subject of the book itself.

Preface

The ideas herein presented stem, for the most part, from my day-to-day clinical work with patients as they struggled to avoid or to gain ever greater levels of maturity. Consequently, this book contains portions of many actual case histories. Confidentiality is essential to psychiatric practice, and all case descriptions, therefore, have been altered in name and in other particulars so as to preserve the anonymity of my patients without distorting the essential reality of our experience with each other.

There may, however, be some distortion by virtue of the brevity of the case presentations. Psychotherapy is seldom a brief process, but since I have, of necessity, focused on the highlights of a case, the reader may be left with the impression that the process is one of drama and clarity. The drama is real and clarity may eventually be achieved, but it should be remembered that in the interest of readability, accounts of the lengthy periods of confusion and frustration inherent in most therapy have been omitted from these case descriptions.

I would also like to apologize for continually referring to God in the traditionally masculine image, but I have done so in the interest of simplicity rather than from any rigidly held concept as to gender.

As a psychiatrist, I feel it is important to mention at the outset two assumptions that underlie this book. One is that I make no distinction between the mind and the spirit, and therefore no distinction between the process of achieving spiritual growth and achieving mental growth. They are one and the same.

        The other assumption is that this process is a complex, arduous and lifelong task. Psychotherapy, if it is to provide substantial assistance to the process of mental and spiritual growth, is not a quick or simple procedure. I do not belong to any particular school of psychiatry or psychotherapy; I am not simply a Freudian or Jungian or Adlerian or behaviorist or gestaltist. I do not believe there are any single easy answers. I believe that brief forms of psychotherapy may be helpful and are not to be decried, but the help they provide is inevitably superficial. The journey of spiritual growth is a long one. I would like to thank those of my patients who have given me the privilege of accompanying them for major portions of their journey. For their journey has also been mine, and much of what is presented here is what we have learned together. I would also like to thank many of my teachers and colleagues. Principal among them is my wife, Lily. She has been so giving that it is hardly possible to distinguish her wisdom as a spouse, parent, psychotherapist, and person from my own.

© Simon & Schuster, Inc.