Love: What it is, What it is not and What its role is – M. Scott Peck – Part 2

Menanteau Serfontein – 1 July 2021. Updated 13 January 2022.

In a recent 4-Part Series, we described the four interrelated Tools/Techniques of “Discipline” to deal with suffering and the means of experiencing the pain of problems constructively as contained in the best seller Book entitled “The Road Less Travelled” that was Authored by M. Scott Peck, an American Psychiatrist.

Peck states that the Will (the motive and driving force) to use these Tools/Techniques, is Love.

This is Part 2 of a Three-Part series that covers the extensive practical understanding, experience, principles and advice of M. Scott Peck about What is Love, What it is Not and What its Role is.

Part 3 will provide a brief general overview of the essence of Love from a completely different perspective.

Peck states that he makes no distinction between the mind and the spirit, and therefore no distinction between the process of achieving spiritual growth and achieving mental growth. For the avoidance of confusion, my simplified interpretation of Peck’s reference to “spiritual growth” is that he means personal growth of our “inner being”. 

Please note that almost all of the content of this Article has been transcribed verbatim from Peck’s Book.

What Love Is

1. The Work of Attention

It requires work (and work requires effort) as well as courage (in defiance of fear) to nurture our own or another’s personal growth. The principal form that the work of love takes is attention. When we love one another, we give one another our attention which is an act of will – we make the effort to set aside our preoccupations and actively shift our consciousness.

By far, the most common and important way in which we can exercise our attention is by listening. We will be wise to give our children some instruction in the process of learning, because generally at school, most of the emphasis is on how to read and how to speak, but not on the importance of listening and how to listen.  Listening well, is an exercise of attention and by necessity hard work. Most people do not listen well, either because they don’t realize its importance or because they are unwilling to make the effort and do the work involved in the process of listening.

True listening, total concentration on the other, is always a manifestation of love in action, especially in marriage. Peck suggests that couples should talk to each other “by appointment”, because true listening can only occur when conditions are supportive of it, e.g. if the other person is in the middle of an important task requiring focus and concentration, then it is an inappropriate time to expect the other person to listen.

Since love is work, the essence of non-love is laziness.

2. The Risk of Loss

As previously stated, the act of love – extending oneself – requires a moving out against the inertia of laziness (vs work) or the resistance engendered by fear (vs courage and love). Courage is not the absence of fear; it is taking action in spite of fear, the moving out against the resistance engendered by fear into the unknown and into the future. Some people devote their whole life to avoid risks and in doing so, they must accept that they will be forfeiting many potentially highly rewarding things such as getting married, having children, friendships, making a difference in someone else’s life and opportunities to grow as an individual – things that enrich one’s life and making life meaningful and significant. A full life will be full of pain, but also full of joy and meaning.

3. The Risk of Independence

 All of life itself represents risk, and the more lovingly we live our lives, the more risks we take. The greatest risk is the risk of growing up. Growing up is the act of stepping from childhood into adulthood. Actually, it is more of a fearful leap than a step, and it is a leap that many people never really take in their lifetime. Though they may outwardly appear to be adults, even successful adults, perhaps the majority of “Grown-ups” remain until their death, psychological children who have never separated themselves from their parents and the power that their parents have over them.

4. The Risk of Commitment

Commitment is the foundation, the bedrock, of any genuinely loving relationship. Problems of commitment are a major inherent part of most psychiatric disorders and issues of commitment are crucial in the course of psychotherapy. Character-disordered individuals tend to form only shallow commitments and when their disorders are severe, these individuals seem to totally lack the desire and will to form commitments at all, because they basically don’t understand what commitment is all about. Neurotics, on the other hand, are generally aware of the nature of commitment, but are frequently paralyzed by the fear of it.

5. The Risk of Confrontation

For the truly loving person, the act of criticizing or confrontation does not come easily; to such a person it is evident that the act has great potential for arrogance, instead of exercising humility, even if he/she knows that he/she is “right” about the given issue to be addressed.

If they love their children, parents must sparingly and carefully, but nonetheless actively, confront and criticize them from time to time, just as they must allow their children to confront and criticize them in turn. Similarly, loving spouses must repeatedly confront each other if the marriage relationship is to serve the function of promoting the spiritual growth of the partners. No marriage can be judged truly successful unless husband and wife are each other’s best critics.

6. Love is Disciplined

Any genuine lover behaves with self-discipline and any genuinely loving relationship is a disciplined relationship. If I truly love another, I will obviously order my behaviour in such a way as to contribute the utmost to his/her personal growth. Whilst one should not be a slave to one’s feelings, self-discipline does not mean the squashing of one another’s feelings into non-existence. I frequently tell my patients that their feelings are their slaves. We need to discipline our feelings (slaves). If not, they start taking over and act as if they are the boss.

The proper management of one’s feelings clearly lies along a complex balanced middle path, requiring constant judgement and continuing adjustment. Among the feelings that must be disciplined, is the feeling of love. To attempt to love someone who cannot benefit from your love with spiritual growth, is to waste your energy, to cast your seed upon arid ground.

Peck insists that genuine love, with all the discipline that it requires is the only path to substantial joy. Take another path and you may find rare moments of ecstatic joy, but they will be fleeting and progressively more elusive. The more I nurture the personal growth of another, the more my own personal growth is nurtured. Genuine love is self-replenishing.

7. Love is Separateness

Although the act nurturing another’s spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one’s own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved. The genuine lover always perceives the beloved as someone who has a totally separate identity.

Peck found that mothers of schizophrenic children are frequently extraordinarily narcissistic.  If we do not perceive others as others, but only as an extension of ourselves, narcissistic individuals lack the capacity for empathy, which is the capacity to feel what another is feeling. Lacking empathy, narcissistic parents usually respond inappropriately to their children on an emotional level and fail to offer any recognition or verification of their children’s feelings. Such children grow up with grave difficulties in recognizing, accepting and hence managing their own feelings. Narcissistic parents tend to fail to adequately recognize or fully appreciate the unique individuality of their children.

The difficulty that people generally seem to have in fully appreciating the separateness of those they are close to, interferes with their parenting, as well as all their intimate relationships, including marriage.

In marriage, great mutual contribution, care, time and energy are required by both spouses, but the primary purpose is to nurture each other for individual journeys toward his/her own individual peaks of spiritual/personal growth.

Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other, but actually seeks to cultivate it, even at the risk of separation or loss. The ultimate goal of life remains the spiritual growth of the individual, the solitary journey to peaks that can be climbed only alone. Significant journeys cannot be accomplished without the nurture provided by a successful marriage or a successful society.

Part 3 will provide a brief general overview of the essence of Love from a completely different perspective.

Please note that almost all of the content of this Article has been transcribed verbatim from M. Scott Peck’s Book. 

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