M Scott Peck: 'Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of these greatest truths. It is a great truth because, once we truly see this truth, we transcend it.
Once we truly know that life is difficult - once we truly understand and accept it - then life is no longer difficult." So begins The Road Less Traveled, the self-help book by M Scott Peck which sold six million copies in the US alone and was translated into 20 languages.
Peck died last Sunday at his home in Connecticut, having suffered from pancreatic and liver duct cancer.
In a career which brought him international recognition and a loyal following of readers, Peck - a psychiatrist who spent 10 years in private practice before turning to writing - became one of the leaders in the growth area of self-help books over the last 30 years. The Road Less Traveled, published in 1978, always remained in demand. By the mid-1990s it had appeared in the New York Times best-sellers list more than 250 times.
He received his BA degree magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1958, and his MD degree from the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in 1963. From 1963 until 1972 he served in the army, becoming assistant chief psychiatry and neurology consultant to the surgeon general of the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel. From 1972 to 1983 he ran a private psychiatric practice in Connecticut.
A student of Zen Buddhism, he converted to Christianity in 1980. He followed The Road Less Traveled with People of the Lie: The Hope For Healing Human Evil in 1983 and later What Return Can I Make? Dimensions of the Christian Experience, in 1985. A fourth book entitled The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, was published in 1987.
He then turned to writing novels and works on organisational behaviour, and his 1995 Search of Stones: A Pilgrimage of Faith, Reason and Discovery was described by Publisher's Weekly as a "quirky, magical blend of autobiography, travel, spiritual meditation, history and Arthurian legend".
With a group of others in the 1980s he set up the Foundation for Community Encouragement, a foundation with a mission to promote and teach the principles of community. He received a number of awards, including the Learning, Faith and Freedom Medal from Georgetown University in 1996.
He worked hard at his success. When the first publisher to whom he brought The Road Less Traveled turned it down, Simon & Schuster bought the work for $7,500 and printed a modest hardback run of 5,000 copies. The book took off only after Peck hit the lecture circuit and personally and successfully sought reviews in key publications.
"I guess if you want one single thing I'm about," Peck said, "it's that I'm against easy answers."
Of The Road Less Traveled, he said: "Perhaps the most radical thing that I said in that book that deviated from traditional psychiatry is that I located the source of psychiatric ills in the conscious mind, rather than the unconscious.
"And that the previous view, the Freudian sort of view, had been that the unconscious was filled with all these bad feelings, and angry thoughts, sexy thoughts and whatnot. And that was where psychiatric, psychological illness originated. When in fact, the real question is why those things, which were obvious, were in the unconscious, rather than the conscious mind.
"The answer was that it was a conscious mind that didn't want to face certain truths, and pushed this stuff into the unconscious.
"I believe that the soul is the deepest part of us. I believe it is the part that God wants us to be. I believe that our souls are not born fully developed and that this world, as Keats put it, is 'the vale of soul-making."
Many people, he said, tried to ignore God, but perhaps found they could not.
"I think that God has a relationship with all of us, in the sense we're all in relationship with God, but for many people that relationship is one of indifference or it's a running away from relationship. A lot of people run scared. For good reason, as St Paul said, 'It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God'."
Peck is survived by his second wife, Kathleen Kline Yates Peck; two children from his earlier marriage to Lily Ho, Belinda and Christopher; and two grandchildren.
M Scott Peck: Born May 22nd, 1936; died September 25th, 2005