The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

by M. Scott Peck

Moreover, the severity of one’s mental illness is directly determined by the severity and the earliness of the parental deprivation that one experienced in childhood. Specifically, individuals with psychoses are thought to have experienced extremely poor parenting in the first nine months of life; their resulting illness can be ameliorated by this or that form of treatment, but it is almost impossible to cure. Individuals with character disorders are thought to have experienced adequate care as infants but very poor care during the period between roughly nine months and two years of age, with the result that they are less sick than psychotics but still quite sick indeed and very difficult to cure. Individuals with neuroses are thought to have received adequate parenting in their very early childhood but then to have suffered from poor parenting sometime after the age of two but usually beginning before the age of five or six. Neurotics are therefore thought to be less sick than either character-disordered people or psychotics, and consequently much easier to treat and cure.