The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth by M. Scott Peck

The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth by M. Scott Peck

Author:M. Scott Peck [Peck, M. Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2012-03-12T21:00:00+00:00


Love and Psychotherapy

It is hard for me to recapture now the motivation and understanding with which I entered the field of psychiatry fifteen years ago. Certainly I wanted to “help” people. The process of helping people in the other branches of medicine involved technology with which I was uncomfortable and which in other ways seemed too mechanical to suit my tastes. I also found talking to people more fun than poking and prodding them, and the quirks of the human mind seemed inherently more interesting to me than the quirks of the body or the germs infesting it. I had no idea how psychiatrists helped people, except for the fantasy that psychiatrists were the possessors of magical words and magical techniques of interacting with patients which would magically unscramble the knots of the psyche. Perhaps I wanted to be a magician. I had very little notion that the work involved would have something to do with the spiritual growth of patients, and certainly I had no notion whatsoever that it would involve my own spiritual growth.

During my first ten months of training I worked with highly disturbed inpatients who seemed to benefit much more from pills or shock treatments or good nursing care than they did from me, but I learned the traditional magical words and techniques of interaction. After this period I began to see my first neurotic patient for long-term outpatient psychotherapy. Let me call her Marcia. Marcia came to see me three times a week. It was a real struggle. She wouldn’t talk about the things I wanted her to talk about, and she wouldn’t talk about them in the way I wanted, and sometimes she just wouldn’t talk at all. In some ways our values were quite different; in the struggle she came to modify hers somewhat and I came to modify mine somewhat. But the struggle continued despite my storehouse of magical words and techniques and postures, and there was no sign that Marcia was improving. Indeed, shortly after she started to see me she began a pattern of almost outrageous promiscuity, and for months she recounted unabatedly innumerable incidents of “bad behavior.” Finally, after a year of this, she asked me in the middle of a session, “Do you think I’m a bit of a shit?”

“You seem to be asking me to tell you what I think of you,” I replied, brilliantly stalling for time.

That was exactly what she wanted, she said. But what did I do now? What magical words or techniques or postures could help me? I could say, “Why do you ask that?” or “What are your fantasies about what I think of you?” or “What’s important, Marcia, is not what I think of you but what you think of yourself.” Yet I had an overpowering feeling that these gambits were cop-outs, and that after a whole year of seeing me three times a week the least Marcia was entitled to was an honest answer from me as to what I thought of her.



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