Where Demons Lurk

I was just finishing a chapter on exorcism in a book of my own on Jesus when M. Scott Peck's "Glimpses of the Devil" came into my hands. I have been a psychotherapist for many years and have always addressed spiritual issues as well as psychological ones. I wanted to learn from Jesus how to move beyond psychology to deal with the demonic directly. While I agree that people can be taken over by an urge to be destructive, I never imagined anything so graphic and traditional as the exorcisms Peck describes in his new book.

Here, Peck--well-known author of "The Road Less Traveled"--offers case studies of two emotionally troubled women and the demons he believed possessed them. He tells the story of the two exorcisms he conducted in the 1980s with a small cadre of clergy, health professionals, and available lay people.

He thinks that in rare cases people may have psychological problems but may also be literally possessed by Satan and other demons. In dealing with possession, psychology, he implies, is inadequate and must give way to more muscular, daring, and religious acts of "deliverance" and exorcism-procedures that Peck describes in detail.

In both cases, he and his aides gathered with the "patient" in a bedroom of a house that had been offered to them. The sessions took about eight hours a day over the course of three to four days. Peck was the exorcist, leading the group in prayers and pronouncing the classic commands for the demon to depart. He addressed the demons one after another by name, trying to trick them into submission by clever reasoning or by personal righteousness. The crucial point of knowing the difference between psychological disturbance and possession was pretty much left to the exorcist's intuition and judgment.

I'm surprised that Peck presents such a literal notion of the demonic. He consults a self-professed expert on exorcism, Malachi Martin, who had a reputation for being both brilliant and preposterous, and he gathers a team who don't seem terribly knowledgeable or confident in what they are doing. Yet they are inserting themselves aggressively into these two women's lives. One fears that the book will encourage others to see demons everywhere and deal with them harshly.

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