Books about therapy don’t usually sell very well and when Dr M. Scott Peck, an American Psychiatrist, wrote The Road Less Travelled he wasn’t sure he would sell any. After all it was about the role that spirituality can play in therapy, a concept that was widely ignored by western psychiatry at the time (the book was published in 1978).
The Road Less Travelled had a huge impact on psychiatry, therapy and people all over the world. It sold over ten million copies, was translated into more than twenty languages and is still selling like hot cakes on Amazon.com. David Sheff interviewed him for Playboy and wrote “Few books since the Bible have influenced so many people. Certainly, few have sold more.”
Peck has a lot of good things to say about Alcoholics Anonymous, which has spirituality at its core. He calls alcoholism “the sacred disease”and says that “alcoholics and AA have a great blessing and a great genius.” This is quite refreshing as I have seen a lot of rather cruel and cynical criticism of AA recently (Youtube is rife with it).
Peck’s praise of AA isn’t some feelgood technique to make addicts feel better about themselves. It is backed up by some really interesting points and can be read in his book Further Along the Road Less Travelled. He believes that we are all “broken”– full of grief and terror — even if we are not fully aware of it. And we are doubly cursed because we can’t talk to each other about these things, even though they are critical to our happiness. We hide behind masks of composure.
Alcoholics, on the other hand, are not any more broken than the rest of us but they are unable to hide it anymore. “So the great blessing of alcoholism is the nature of the disease. It puts people into a visible crisis, and as a result into a community — an AA group.”
Community is the key to personal development, spirituality and happi
