Glimpses of the Devil

A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption

M. Scott Peck

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780743276542
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The legendary bestselling author and renowned psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, whose books have sold over 14 million copies, reveals the amazing true story of his work as an exorcist -- kept secret for more than twenty-five years -- in two profoundly human stories of satanic possession.
In the tradition of his million-copy bestseller People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, Scott Peck's new book offers the first complete account of exorcism and possession by a modern psychiatrist in this extraordinary personal narrative of his efforts to heal patients suffering from demonic and satanic possession.
For the first time, Dr. Peck discusses his experience in conducting exorcisms, sharing the spellbinding details of his two major cases: one a moving testament to his healing abilities, and the other a perilous and ultimately unsuccessful struggle against darkness and evil. Twenty-seven-year-old Jersey was of average intelligence; a caring and devoted wife and mother to her husband and two young daughters, she had no history of mental illness. Beccah, in her mid-forties and with a superior intellect, had suffered from profound depression throughout her life, choosing to remain in an abusive relationship with her husband, one dominated by distrust and greed.
Until the day Dr. Peck first met the young woman called Jersey, he did not believe in the devil. In fact, as a mature, highly experienced psychiatrist, he expected that this case would resolve his ongoing effort to prove to himself, as scientifically as possible, that there were absolutely no grounds for such beliefs. Yet what he discovered could not be explained away simply as madness or by any standard clinical diagnosis. Through a series of unanticipated events, Dr. Peck found himself thrust into the role of exorcist, and his desire to treat and help Jersey led him down a path of blurred boundaries between science and religion. Once there, he came face-to-face with deeply entrenched evil and ultimately witnessed the overwhelming healing power of love.
In Glimpses of the Devil, Dr. Peck's celebrated gift for integrating psychiatry and religion is demonstrated yet again as he recounts his journey from skepticism to eventual acknowledgment of the reality of an evil spirit, even at the risk of being shunned by the medical establishment. In the process, he also finds himself compelled to confront the larger paradox of free will, of a commitment to goodness versus enslavement to the forms of evil, and the monumental clash of forces that endangers both sanity and the soul.
Glimpses of the Devil is unquestionably among Scott Peck's most powerful, scrupulously written, and important books in many years. At once deeply sensitive and intensely chilling, it takes a clear-eyed look at one of the most mysterious and misunderstood areas of human experience.

PART I

Jersey

CHAPTER 1

DIAGNOSIS

“I feel sorry for them.”

Jersey Babcock belonged to two strong, close-knit families living in the same southwestern city. At twenty-one she married Peter Babcock and quickly had two daughters. Peter’s several brothers and sisters had migrated elsewhere, but they usually came home for family gatherings. The Babcock family were not exactly atheists, but certainly agnostic and distinctly secular.

Jersey’s parents, the Lewises, and her siblings were active Christians, but theirs was a freewheeling brand of Christianity characterized by vagueness and tolerance. Their unspoken motto seemed to be “Live and let live.” Their theology ranged across the map. Even if their belief systems were nebulous, it was evident that they all loved one another. The Lewises were a bit more psychologically sophisticated than most because they had a family psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Lieberman. Most of the Lewis family had used his services upon one occasion or another with the exception of Jersey, until the day before this story begins.

Until that day, as far as anyone knew, Jersey was mentally stable. She was a very caring mother to her young daughters. If she had any fascination, it was an interest in all manner of New Age varieties of spiritualism. She spent most of her free time visiting the scores of psychics in her city. This interest in spiritualism—even in the occult—was nothing new. Her mother remembered Jersey reading all the works of Edgar Cayce the year she was twelve.

On the opening day of this story, Jersey, now twenty-five, went to see Dr. Lieberman for the first time, having made an appointment a week before. She was clear about why she was there. Almost her first words were “I’m possessed.” Dr. Lieberman managed to keep his cool and inquired about what she meant, but he made little sense out of her answers. He suggested she might be helped by taking some Thorazine that he could prescribe. She declined that or any medicine. Dr. Lieberman then focused on building a relationship with her. Jersey did come for two more visits, but then quit. Dr. Lieberman had not been able to engage her in therapy.

The next external event in the story occurred six months later. At two o’clock in the morning, Jersey awoke from a terrifying nightmare. Peter tried to comfort her, but Jersey insisted upon calling her mother. Her mother and stepfather came right over, and it was then that Jersey told them all that she was possessed.

The family’s response was to ask her to return to see Dr. Lieberman. She agreed. Once again she turned down Dr. Lieberman’s offer of medication, and once again he was unable to engage her in therapy.

Mrs. Lewis was particularly concerned: she had noticed that Jersey was no longer attending to her young daughters as well as before. She seemed irritable with them and was requesting an ever-increasing number of baby-sitters so that she might attend psychic meetings. Thinking perhaps she ought to take her daughter’s self-diagnosis seriously, Mrs. Lewis wondered where to turn. Although she had had no previous relationship with the Catholic church, she thought that the matter of possession probably was more a Catholic concern than a Protestant one. She called the nearest large Catholic church and explained the situation. Several days later the church sent a young priest to talk with Jersey. Later, he would tell me that Jersey had said something horrible to him—he couldn’t remember what—and he had no other recollection of the visit. He did, however, refer Jersey to the diocesan exorcist with the recommendation that her case be taken seriously.

The diocesan exorcist, Father Terry O’Connor, and his assistant came a week later to visit Jersey. After spending four full hours with her and briefly conferring with each other, they told Mrs. Lewis they thought Jersey was indeed possessed, but that she was not yet psychologically ready for an exorcism and should first receive psychotherapy before they could see her again.

Understandably, Mrs. Lewis was dissatisfied with this recommendation. It put Jersey in a classical Catch-22 position, recommending that she be engaged in psychotherapy when, on two prior occasions, she had failed to become a psychotherapeutic candidate. Mrs. Lewis confided her dilemma to a Catholic friend who happened to have read Malachi Martin’s Hostage to the Devil and suggested that she read it. Mrs. Lewis immediately did so and then, with equal dispatch, wrote to Malachi Martin for help. Malachi asked me if I would fly to the Southwest to evaluate the case. I said I would, and Malachi referred me to Mrs. Lewis to make the necessary arrangements.

When I first arrived, I spoke with Mrs. Lewis to get an account of the family constellation. What I thought would be a brief description turned out to be as complicated as any I had ever encountered. Mrs. Lewis had had four husbands, and her five children had three different fathers. Jersey was the second child.

Mrs. Lewis was married to her first husband, Sean Flannigan, a boat salesman, for six years. She divorced him because of his drinking when Jersey was only a year old and her brother five. Some years later Flannigan died at a relatively early age from his alcoholism.

Mrs. Lewis quickly remarried an independently wealthy clergyman, Caleb Lewis, by whom she had a daughter and son. Jersey and her brother took their new stepfather’s name. Jersey had no memories of her biological father. She always thought of herself as a Lewis and referred to her stepfather as her father.

Bored with being a minister, Caleb decided to become a psychologist. After obtaining his Ph.D. in psychology, he soon developed a thriving psychotherapy practice out of his home. For the entirety of her late childhood and early adolescent years, Jersey could remember the stream of patients coming in and out of the house. When practicing, he always wore a long, starched white coat, traditional for physicians but extremely rare for psychologists. His patients respectfully called him “Dr. Lewis.” Caleb Lewis died suddenly from a heart attack when Jersey was fifteen. Jersey grieved for him deeply.

Eighteen months after her second husband’s death, Mrs. Lewis remarried another independently wealthy man, a mildly successful painter. A year later, they adopted a two-year-old boy. A year after that, the artist left Mrs. Lewis and their child for another woman. Mrs. Lewis quickly sued him for divorce and received a decent settlement without alimony. For the next few years Mrs. Lewis heard rumors that he was bisexual and flagrantly promiscuous. At the time I met her, Mrs. Lewis had no idea where he lived.

Two years after that divorce, Mrs. Lewis married her fourth husband, an engineer named Harry Anderson, but kept the name of her second husband and longest marriage. Harry had been an unusually good stepfather to all five of her children in the years since, Mrs. Lewis said, noting that Jersey adored him. I also got the impression that he was the most deeply religious person in the family, a man who attended church on Sunday without fail. Occasionally, Mrs. Lewis would accompany him. It was obvious to me that theirs was a good and solid marriage.

It took me an hour to obtain Jersey’s complicated family history. Psychiatrists are not immune to prejudice. Initially, I imagined Mrs. Lewis might have some personality problem that would account for her many marriages. But I did not find one. To the contrary, by the end of the hour I reached the conclusion that she was a remarkably strong woman, capable of either firmness or flexibility as the occasion required. I judged her to be a fine mother who loved all her children well—a judgment that would be borne out in the months to come.

I then spent close to a half hour with Jersey’s husband, Peter Babcock. A successful executive in his late twenties, I also found him to be a strong person, genuinely concerned about his young wife and his baby daughters. Perhaps a bit too strong, he struck me as being an overcontrolling sort of man. But if he was that way with Jersey she never seemed to mind—at least on the surface.

Tired from my flight, I waited until the next morning to speak with Jersey herself. The primary focus of our conversation was her experience with a variety of demons speaking to her, both in her dreams and when awake. The names of those demons seemed to keep changing, as if Jersey were making them up on the spot. Only one of them seemed constant—an entity she called the Lord Josiah.

Superficially, I found Jersey to be pleasant and vivacious, but obviously she was a young lady with psychiatric difficulties. She was slightly flirtatious, remarkably naive, and a bit overdramatic—all of which could suggest a diagnosis of hysteria. But she was also pressured, speaking rapidly with what we psychiatrists call flight of ideas, suggestive of a possible schizophrenic condition, only she had none of the emotional blunting characteristic of schizophrenia. If you take a bit of hysteria and add it to a mere hint of schizophrenia, what you get in psychiatry is a vague but well recognized and common condition called borderline personality disorder.

So after four quite friendly hours with her I had already diagnosed Jersey as a borderline and was in the process of mentally packing my bags and making a third notch in the handle of my scientific pistol, when Jersey blew the whole thing wide open with a single sentence. Referring to her demons, she said, “I feel sorry for them.”

“You feel sorry for them?” I echoed, confused.

“Yes,” she answered, “they’re really rather weak and pathetic creatures.”

The reason this stopped me dead in my tracks was that it did not fit with standard psychopathology. It seemed to me that if a young woman—particularly a somewhat hysterical one—had a need to invent demons, she would create great, strong, hairy demons, not weak and pathetic ones.

So I mentally unpacked my bags to explore things more deeply.

“Could I talk to your demons?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” Jersey responded. “They would be much too afraid to do that.”

I was already in utterly uncharted waters, so why not keep rowing ahead? “Perhaps they would talk to me under hypnosis,” I said. “How would you feel about being hypnotized, Jersey?”

“That would be kind of fun,” Jersey replied in her childlike manner, more like that of a twelve-year-old than a twenty-six-year-old mother of two. “I’ve never been hypnotized before. It sounds interesting. How do you go about it?”

I explained to her the standard techniques of inducing hypnosis, and she readily agreed to a session. She proved to be an unusually good hypnotic subject, and within a few minutes was in a deep trance. I then asked once again if I could speak to her demons. This time Jersey said, “Well, there are so many of them, but there are at least a couple in here that really do want to talk to you.”

“Let them go ahead,” I welcomed.

I cannot now, more than twenty years later, remember their names, and it doesn’t matter anyway, as we shall eventually see. They were both female and did indeed sound weak and pathetic. Each acknowledged that they did things to frighten or otherwise hurt Jersey, but each maintained that if they didn’t, their “employer” would hurt them. They began to whimper at their bind and, speaking together now, asked, “Can you help us, Dr. Peck? Won’t you try to help us?”

I clearly remember feeling like I was Alice in Wonderland, speaking to these supposed demons with Jersey under hypnosis. In one sense, I did know how to help them. A part of me felt like saying: “As always, your salvation lies in going to the cross by refusing to hurt Jersey. Yes, you then might be hurt, but you will be free, and it’s obviously the only way to end this stupid game.” Fortunately, through the clutter of my thoughts, my still, small voice told me that the supposed demons were using my tendency to be a compulsive helper to suck me into a place I didn’t belong. I simply told them that I had to leave them, and I proceeded to bring Jersey out of her trance. Afterward, she was more lucid and mature than she had been at any time with me throughout the day.

Jersey had looked a little bit schizophrenic, and one of the reasons I was anxious about hypnotizing her was that schizophrenics tend to become more disorganized after hypnosis. Yet Jersey had become better organized. My mindset was beginning to change.

The dilemma the supposed demons complained about—that they would be hurt if they did not hurt Jersey—fit with the little I knew of demonology. The demonic hierarchy is so strict and merciless that lesser demons seem to have negligible freedom. Yet, as far as I could ascertain, Jersey had no knowledge of demonology. At this point, all I could do was tell her and her family that I was very uncertain about the case, and that, after I got home, I would be in further contact with Malachi Martin and probably Dr. Lieberman and Father O’Connor as well. After that, I would get back in touch with them.

As I flew back home that evening, three things came to mind. One was the expression “poor devil,” remembering how under hypnosis the supposed demons had whimpered about their predicament. For me there was meaning in the phrase for the first time. The second, remembering how Jersey had seemed more rather than less sane after I had listened to her supposed demons, was the expression “Give the devil his due.” Perhaps doing that briefly had allowed the devil to step aside somewhat. Finally, I recalled a brief paragraph from Hostage to the Devil where Malachi had noted that an unusual percentage—not all but many—of possessed people had slightly strange faces in which their skin seemed tightly stretched so as to be smooth and relatively lacking in wrinkles. I cursed myself for not recognizing it at the time, but Jersey had just such a face.

When the day began I did not believe there was such a thing as possession. As a psychiatrist I was still in no way ready to pronounce Jersey possessed, but with the list of contradictions Jersey already posed to traditional psychiatry, mountains had been moved in my mind. I knew that when I called Malachi, I would be telling him my assessment was that there was a fifty-fifty chance Jersey was the genuine article and that the case deserved to be delved into more deeply.

• • •

I did, of course, phone Malachi and recount my observations. I told him that Jersey did not quite fit the standard categories of psychopathology. It was conceivable to me she could be possessed, but I was hardly able to make such a diagnosis without knowing her better. I felt I needed to be more certain before turning the case over to him. He made no response to my intent to give him the case.

I suggested contacting Father O’Connor, the diocesan exorcist, to propose that he and I do some work together on Jersey’s case. Indeed, I wanted to clarify for Father O’Connor the Catch- 22 situation in which he had placed Jersey and her family and make him accountable for a better resolution. Malachi agreed with my strategy.

When I phoned Father O’Connor, he was perfectly receptive. I explained the extent to which Jersey did not fit the established categories of psychiatric diagnosis, which was why, as a scientific-minded psychiatrist, I thought she might be possessed. I further gave him my opinion that she was not amenable to psychotherapy in her current state and that insisting she get therapy before an exorcism was probably approaching the case backward. My instinct was that she likely required an exorcism before she could meaningfully participate in psychotherapy, though I did volunteer that these were shaky opinions. I couldn’t say Jersey was possessed—only that she might be.

Father O’Connor was not threatened by my opinions in the least. I learned that he was unusually sophisticated in psychiatric matters, having spent several years studying psychiatry at a prominent clinic. By the end of the conversation we had not only become colleagues but friends. I called him Terry and he called me Scotty.

Accepting my uncertainty, Terry proposed attempting a deliverance with Jersey. Beyond assuming that a deliverance was a religious, healing process that stopped short of a full-scale exorcism, I knew nothing about the matter. But it was Terry’s field of expertise. He had a team of another Christian man and woman with whom he worked, and he customarily did deliverances in a common room at the monastery where he lived, an hour’s drive from Jersey’s home. He suggested therefore that I return to th...