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The following is a transcribed excerpt from one of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s 2015 lectures. You can <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast" target="_blank" rel="noopener">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast">watch</a> more from Dr. Peterson on DailyWire+.
“Pinocchio” is a story that includes an initiation ritual and a journey to the depths (the underworld). It is a story of the consequence of a collapse of previous personality and the disintegration of that previous personality into a chaotic state prior to rebirth.
Pinocchio, a puppet, tries to become a real boy. In the beginning, he is a marionette. <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-role-of-the-holy-spirit-distinguishing-between-your-will-and-gods-will" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Carl Jung</a> explained that is your habitual state of being: Something else is pulling your strings. Even the idea that you are autonomous is the consequence of something else pulling your strings, so for Jung, what you needed to do was find out exactly who and what is pulling your strings and decide if that is the direction in which you want to go. That is what happens to Pinocchio in the story.
Pinocchio is a marionette made by Geppetto, a good father. He is a marionette with a benevolent puppeteer. But as soon as he develops some autonomy, he becomes prey to forces that are elements of the demonic archetype. In fact, the worst bad guy in the entire story turns into Satan himself. So Pinocchio goes through a series of temptations of various sorts, including a Freudian temptation to remain weak and sickly instead of becoming a real person. Another temptation Pinocchio faces is being offered false celebrity as a way of solving his life’s problems. He is offered the opportunity to become an actor when a deceitful fate constructs a persona that makes him appear far more valuable than he really is. These are two pathological modes of movement towards maturity — one being a phony, and the other taking the easy way out and hyper-valuing pathologies to the degree he becomes dependent.
The third pathological development offered to Pinocchio occurs on Pleasure Island, which is to do nothing but engage in short-term impulsive and destructive play. But when he goes to Pleasure Island, he finds that the island is actually ruled by demonic forces, faceless entities who are transforming all the pleasure-seeking marionettes into donkeys who are slaves. Pinocchio escapes from that by jumping into the unknown, represented by jumping into the water, which is equivalent to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-role-of-the-holy-spirit-distinguishing-between-your-will-and-gods-will" target="_blank" rel="noopener">plunging into chaos</a> — his exposure to his initiation. In other words, chaos was an escape from pathological tyranny.
Now, the cricket. While I cannot tell you everything about this element of the story, I can tell you a couple strange notions about it. The initials are J.C., and Jiminy Cricket was a common, mild-form of Southern American cursing; it is the equivalent of Jesus Christ. So you might think, and of course, the cricket is Pinocchio’s conscience. So why in the world would a pejorative term for Jesus Christ be applied to a cricket who is guiding a puppet into the water to rescue his father from a whale? Why would any of that happen? You know why but you cannot say why. You cannot say why you know or what it is you know, but the mere fact that it makes sense — and it does — is an indication from a Jungian perspective that you are operating at an archetypal level.
Further, the cricket is a bug. Why might this be? Well, things bug you. You should do something about the things that bug you because that is your conscience calling to you. It is destiny, in some sense, manifesting itself as an unconscious impulse. Now, there are a lot of things out there that might bug you; some of them do not, but lots of them do. Why do certain things bug you and not other things? That is a complicated question, but one potential answer is that there is part of your psyche that is oriented <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-role-of-the-holy-spirit-distinguishing-between-your-will-and-gods-will" target="_blank" rel="noopener">towards further development</a>. Jung would call that the self — essentially, the totality of everything you could be. It is a strange sort of entity because it is partly potential and it is potential that expands across time. But the way that your potential totality calls to you in the present is by placing things in front of you that are your problem. They announce themselves as your problem by bothering you. So if you pick up the task of fixing the thing <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-role-of-the-holy-spirit-distinguishing-between-your-will-and-gods-will" target="_blank" rel="noopener">that bothers you</a>, then you find the pathway to further expansion of your personality.
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That is what happens with Pinocchio. Part of what makes the “Pinocchio” story so incredibly sophisticated is that despite the fact the cricket is an avatar of Christ, so to speak, the cricket has things to learn just like Pinocchio. That implies that you do have a conscience that guides you, but until you establish a dialogue with it, both you and the conscience are immature. You have to establish a conscious dialogue with it and interact together, which propels your development across time. That will stop you from being a marionette of external forces.
Many events at multiple levels of reality happen simultaneously when Pinocchio goes home, which is characteristic of an archetypal story. On one level, Pinocchio is too old to go home; he cannot go home to his father because, in some sense, he has already transcended his father Geppetto. That is on the personal level. On the transpersonal level, the deeper archetypal level, what is happening to Pinocchio is exactly what Nietzsche described at the end of the 19th century. Geppetto is his creator, and now he is dead; he is gone. So Pinocchio is bereft of placement. His soul has been corrupted, and he does not know what to do about it. When he returns to his family home, or to his tradition, he finds nothing.
But then a dove comes along and drops a note right in front of Pinocchio. The star from which the dove comes is a representation of the blue fairy, who is the positive element of the unknown. What this scene is basically saying is: When you are despairing because your father has died and your tradition has nothing to offer, the positive <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-role-of-the-holy-spirit-distinguishing-between-your-will-and-gods-will" target="_blank" rel="noopener">element of the unknown</a> may provide you with a message of where to go if you pay enough attention. That is an intuition of the automatic attraction of your interests to a new thing by forces you do not understand.
One of the real ways of coming to grips with the active unconscious is by understanding you cannot control what you are interested in. If it is not you, then you might ask who or what it is. And if you think about that problem long enough, you will start to understand what Jung was talking about. That is the way you can understand in your own life that the things that direct you as a being are not things that you consciously choose. In fact, they are not even things you can consciously choose.
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<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-role-of-the-holy-spirit-distinguishing-between-your-will-and-gods-will" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson</a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-role-of-the-holy-spirit-distinguishing-between-your-will-and-gods-will" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Maps of Meaning</a>,” “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-role-of-the-holy-spirit-distinguishing-between-your-will-and-gods-will" target="_blank" rel="noopener">12 Rules For Life,</a>” and “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Order-More-Rules-Life/dp/0593084640/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;dib_tag=AUTHOR&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.nbV0WtVit9busCddbjMST-Oe7hjueQrxfqnQ4L3HXXUFdIaqlEBr0sp9HQWIq9ut9NlHDAFA0YQoDWVZfDtKNJI7VvlzWv2rMhs2KcAAIIppPRMWq4GIiFerkrssvBABAjeKlg3OFs3H8IHs5D8ktJ5uBg3K-SZ4hpKltaKkrhY6j-RKn-tTkBz29JZXP3Rhm9SB14rHUX1nol5d4z4Fi6f8fwhxXWCVGgkvOHSqG6E.iVF1NljuBEwrpumO9rQBh9FotnzaIo4K7K8HvNnC46k&amp;qid=&amp;sr=" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Beyond Order.</a>” Be sure to order his newest book, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Who-Wrestle-God-Jordan-Peterson/dp/0593542533/?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_w=38kcw&amp;content-id=amzn1.sym.f911c8db-3a2b-4b3e-952f-b80fdcee83f4&amp;pf_rd_p=f911c8db-3a2b-4b3e-952f-b80fdcee83f4&amp;pf_rd_r=133-1833056-3520340&amp;pd_rd_wg=3zvBk&amp;pd_rd_r=93a1419a-853b-4c49-a764-cbaa90d3073a&amp;ref_=aufs_ap_sc_dsk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">We Who Wrestle with God</a>” (Portfolio/Penguin).
You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast" target="_blank" rel="noopener">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch/jordan-peterson" target="_blank" rel="noopener">watch</a> his popular lectures on DailyWire+.

Readers Pass – Zeisloft – 5 Times Jordan Peterson Left His Opponents Speechless16x9

Psychology And ‘Pinocchio’

Psychology and 'Pinocchio'

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The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/1-introduction-to-the-idea-of-god-new" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Biblical Series</a>, which explores the psychological significance of the Bible. In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNIC-GZzj48" target="_blank" rel="noopener">this segment</a>, he addresses the complex and powerful nature of dreams, comparing it to artists’ talent at portraying more information than has yet to be articulated. He considers the questions: Where does information in a dream come from? What draws us to music? How long have humans been observing each other? And, the eternal question of human beings: How do you live in the world? You can explore more in Dr. Peterson’s <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch/jordan-peterson" target="_blank" rel="noopener">extensive catalog</a>, available on DailyWire+. 
I think the theory that dreams are merely the consequence of random neuronal firing is absolutely absurd because there is nothing random about dreams. They are structured and complex, and they are not like snow on a television screen or static on a radio. They are complicated. I have often seen people have very coherent dreams that have a perfect narrative structure. They are fully developed in some sense. So, that theory just does not go anywhere with me. I cannot see that as useful at all. I am more likely to take the phenomena seriously and say there is something to dreams.
You dream of the future; then you try to make it into a reality. That seems to be important. Or maybe you dream up a nightmare and try to make that into a reality; people do that too if they are hellbent on revenge, for example, and full of hatred and resentment. That manifests itself in terrible fantasies. Those are dreams; then people go act them out. These things are powerful. Whole nations can get caught up in collective dreams. That is what happened to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. It is an absolutely remarkable, amazing, horrific, destructive spectacle. The same thing happened in the Soviet Union. And the same thing happened in China. We have to take these seriously and try to understand what is going on.
Carl Jung believed that dreams could contain more information than was yet articulate. I think artists do the same. People go to museums, and they look at paintings — Renaissance paintings or modern paintings — and they do not exactly know why they are there. I was in a room in New York full of Renaissance art, the greatest painters. I thought maybe that room was worth a billion dollars or something outrageous because there were about 20 paintings in there. Priceless. Why are those paintings worth so much? And why is there a museum in the biggest city in the world devoted to them? And why do people from all over the world come and look at them? What are those people doing? One of them was of the assumption of Mary — a beautifully painted, absolutely glowing work of art — with 20 people standing in front of it looking at it. What are those people up to? They do not know. Why did they make a pilgrimage to New York to come and look at that painting? It is not like they know. Why is it worth so much? I know there is a status element to it too, but that begs the question, why do those items become such high-status items? What is it about them that is so absolutely remarkable? We are strange creatures.
I was trying to figure out, in part, where does the information that is in a dream come from? Because it has to come from somewhere. You can think about it as a revelation because it is as though it springs out of the void, and it is new knowledge and it is a revelation. You did not produce it. It just appears. I am scientifically minded, and I am quite a rational person, and I like to have an explanation for things that is rational and empirical before I look for any other kind of explanation. I do not want to say that everything that is associated with divinity can be reduced in some manner to biology or to evolutionary history or anything like that, but, insofar as it is possible to do that reduction, I am going to do that. And I am going to leave the other phenomena floating in the air because they cannot be pinned down. In that, I would put the category of mystical or religious experience, which we do not understand at all.
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Artists observe one another. They observe people, and they represent what they see. They transmit a message of what they see to us, and they teach us to see. We do not necessarily know what it is we are learning from them, but we are learning something, or, at least, we are acting like we are learning something. We go to movies, we watch stories, and we immerse ourselves in fiction constantly. That is an artistic production. For many people, the world of the arts is a living world, and that is particularly true if you are a creative person. It is the creative, artistic people who move the knowledge of humanity forward, and they do that with their artistic productions first. They are on the edge. The dancers, the poets, the visual artists, and the musicians do that, and we are not sure what they are doing.
Why do you like music? It gives you a deep intimation of the significance of things — and no one questions it. You go to a concert, you are thrilled, and it is a quasi-religious experience, particularly if people really get themselves together and get the crowd moving. There is something incredibly intense about it. It makes no sense whatsoever. It is not an easy thing to understand. Music is deeply patterned, and patterned in layers, and I think that has something to do with it because reality is patterned in layers. So I think music represents reality in some fundamental way, and we get into the sway of that and sort of participate in being. That is part of what makes it such an uplifting experience. But we do not really know that is what we are doing. We just go do it. And it is nourishing for people, young people in particular. Lots of them live for music. It is where they derive all their meaning, their cultural identity, everything that is nourishing comes from their affiliation with their music that is part of their cultural identity. That is an amazing thing.
The question still remains: Where does the information in dreams come from? I think it comes from watching the patterns everyone acts out. We watch that forever, and we have some representations of those patterns. That is part of our cultural history; that is what is embedded in stories, in fictional accounts of the story between good and evil, the bad guy and the good guy, the romance. These are canonical patterns of being for people, and they deeply affect us because they represent what it is we will act out in the world. Then we flesh that out with the individual information we have about ourselves and other people. It is as though there are waves of behavioral patterns that manifest themselves in the crowd across time, that great dramas are played on the crowd across time. The artists watch that, get intimations of what that is, and they write it down and tell us, and then we are a little clearer about what we are up to.
Take, for example, a great dramatist like Shakespeare. We know what he wrote is fiction, and then we say fiction is not true. But then you think, well wait a minute, maybe it is true like numbers are true. Numbers are an abstraction from the underlying reality, but no one in their right mind would really think numbers are not true. You could even make a case that the numbers are more real than the things they represent because the abstraction is so insanely powerful. Once you have mathematics, you are just deadly. You can move the world with mathematics. So, it is not obvious that the abstraction is less real than the more concrete reality. But if you take a work of fiction, like Hamlet, and say it is true because it is fiction, then you think, wait a minute, what kind of explanation is that? But maybe it is more true than nonfiction because it takes the story that needs to be told about you, and it extracts that out and says, “Look, here is something that is a key part of the human experience as such.” It is an abstraction from this underlying noisy substrate, and people are affected by it because they see the thing that is represented is part of the pattern of their being. That is the right way to think about it.
With these old stories, these ancient stories, it seems to me that process has been occurring for thousands of years. It is like we watched ourselves, and we extracted out some stories. We imitated each other, we represented that in drama, and then we distilled the drama, we got a representation of the distillation, and then we did it again at the end of that process. God only knows how long that took. They have traced some fairytales back 10,000 years in relatively unchanged form, and it certainly seems to me that the archaeological evidence suggests that the really old stories the Bible begins with are at least that old and likely embedded in the pre-history that is far older than that. You might think, well, how can you be so sure? The answer to that, in part is, cultures that do not change, like the ancient cultures, did not change as fast; they stayed the same. That is the answer. They keep their information moving generation to generation; that is how they stayed the same. We know again in the archaeological record there are records of rituals that have remained relatively unbroken for up to 20,000 years; it was discovered in caves of Japan that were set up for a particular kind of bear worship that was also characteristic of Western Europe. So these things can last for very long periods of time.
We are watching each other act in the world, and the question is: How long have we been watching each other? The answer to that, in some sense is, as long as there have been creatures with nervous systems. That is a long time. That is some hundreds of millions of years, perhaps longer than that, that we have been watching each other trying to figure out what we are up to across that entire span of time. Some of that knowledge is built right into our bodies, which is why we can dance with each other, for example, because understanding is not just something that you have as an abstraction; it is something that you act out. That is what children are doing when they are learning to rough and tumble play. They are learning to integrate their body with the body of someone else in a harmonious way, learning to cooperate and compete. That is all instantiated right into their body. It is not abstract knowledge; they do not know that they are doing that. They are just doing it. We can even use our body as a representational platform. So, we have been studying each other for a long time, abstracting out what it is that we are up to.
What should we be up to? That is an even more fundamental question. If you are going to live in the world, and you are going to do it properly, what does properly mean and who is it that you might go to about that? That is the right question. It is what everyone wants to know. How do you live in the world? Not, what is the world made of? How do you live in the world? It is the eternal question of human beings, and I guess we are the only species that has ever really asked that question because all the other animals just go and do whatever they do. But not us. It is a question for us. 
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To continue, listen or watch more content with Dr. Jordan Peterson on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch" target="_blank" rel="noopener">DailyWire+</a>.
<a href="https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson</a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Maps-Meaning-Architecture-Jordan-Peterson/dp/0415922216/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Maps of Meaning</a>,” “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/12-Rules-Life-Antidote-Chaos/dp/0345816021/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=" target="_blank" rel="noopener">12 Rules For Life,</a>” and “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Order-More-Rules-Life/dp/0593084640/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;dib_tag=AUTHOR&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.nbV0WtVit9busCddbjMST-Oe7hjueQrxfqnQ4L3HXXUFdIaqlEBr0sp9HQWIq9ut9NlHDAFA0YQoDWVZfDtKNJI7VvlzWv2rMhs2KcAAIIppPRMWq4GIiFerkrssvBABAjeKlg3OFs3H8IHs5D8ktJ5uBg3K-SZ4hpKltaKkrhY6j-RKn-tTkBz29JZXP3Rhm9SB14rHUX1nol5d4z4Fi6f8fwhxXWCVGgkvOHSqG6E.iVF1NljuBEwrpumO9rQBh9FotnzaIo4K7K8HvNnC46k&amp;qid=&amp;sr=" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Beyond Order.</a>” You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast" target="_blank" rel="noopener">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch/jordan-peterson" target="_blank" rel="noopener">watch</a> his popular lectures on DailyWire+.
Be sure to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Who-Wrestle-God-Jordan-Peterson/dp/0593542533/?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_w=38kcw&amp;content-id=amzn1.sym.f911c8db-3a2b-4b3e-952f-b80fdcee83f4&amp;pf_rd_p=f911c8db-3a2b-4b3e-952f-b80fdcee83f4&amp;pf_rd_r=133-1833056-3520340&amp;pd_rd_wg=3zvBk&amp;pd_rd_r=93a1419a-853b-4c49-a764-cbaa90d3073a&amp;ref_=aufs_ap_sc_dsk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">PRE-ORDER</a> Dr. Peterson’s newest book: “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Who-Wrestle-God-Jordan-Peterson/dp/0593542533/?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_w=38kcw&amp;content-id=amzn1.sym.f911c8db-3a2b-4b3e-952f-b80fdcee83f4&amp;pf_rd_p=f911c8db-3a2b-4b3e-952f-b80fdcee83f4&amp;pf_rd_r=133-1833056-3520340&amp;pd_rd_wg=3zvBk&amp;pd_rd_r=93a1419a-853b-4c49-a764-cbaa90d3073a&amp;ref_=aufs_ap_sc_dsk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">We Who Wrestle with God</a>” (Portfolio/Penguin. November 19, 2024.)

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

The Eternal Question Of Human Beings: How Do You Live In The World? 

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The following is a transcribed excerpt from one of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s 2020 lectures. In this segment, he discusses how we perceive the world, what causes our emotions to be destabilized, why we experience negative emotion when our plans change, and how our nervous system assess situations. You can <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast">watch</a> more from Dr. Peterson on DailyWire+.
We do not see objects, think about them, evaluate them, and then decide how to act on them — or, if we do, we do it rarely, slowly, and with a lot of thought. What we see, instead, are obstacles or pathways with tools that will move us forward. When there are no obstacles in front of you — when there is a nice flat road — you experience positive emotion. You think, “This is a task I can undertake. The sailing is clear. It is a good day.” When there is an obstacle in front of you, you experience a little pang of disappointment and anxiety. You think, “Can I make it around that obstacle?” If you have done so before, you will think, fairly confidently, “I can walk forward, and then circumvent the obstacle.” It is a minor disruption to the perceptual set of skills you use to organize the world. It is a minor bit of chaos. If, however, you do not know how to engage in circumvention, then you would be unable to get from point A to point B; that would be a problem for your plan. When your perceptual set — the structure you are using to organize the world; the plan through which you are viewing the complexity of the world — reveals an inadequacy, then that destabilizes your emotions.
Regardless, you need to be going somewhere, and there needs to be a pathway in order for you to feel good. If that plan is untenable or becomes destabilized, then you become flooded with negative emotion: frustration, disappointment, anger, and primarily anxiety. But all of those emotions sort of intermingle. You may feel anger because you have to fight your way through the obstacle; frustration because maybe you have to make a new plan; disappointment because you devoted work to the plan and it did not work out; and anxiety because now there are too many choices in front of you. So people do not like to have their plans disrupted. The reason for that is that their plans are directly associated with their emotional perception of the world.
That is a good thing to know: Your plans are directly associated with your emotional perception of the world. For example, if you decide you are going to go to a Korean restaurant for dinner, and it turns out that you cannot — maybe you have to go to a Greek restaurant — who cares? (Unless you hate Greek restaurants.) A Korean restaurant is pretty good and a Greek restaurant is pretty good. But you are still going to be annoyed that your plans changed. Why? Because when your plans change, the structure that you use to stabilize your perceptions of the world is disrupted. It momentarily throws you into a state of chaos.
How much chaos? This is interesting. We do not know. If you wake up one morning and you have an ache in your side, what does it mean that you have an ache in your side? You do not know. Maybe it means you pulled a muscle. Maybe it means you have cancer and you only have months to live. The whole range of possibility is there. Some people will assume one thing, and some people will assume the other — and all of them will be right sometimes. So the question is, how do you calibrate something like that? The answer is, we tend to guess at it temperamentally. We have our set points for negative emotion (neuroticism trait), and some people would be a lot more nervous about a small-level anomaly than others. Maybe they will go to the hospital first and they will not die, or maybe they will be freaking out all the time and they will be a hypochondriac. There are pros and cons about being nervous like that. Perhaps the other person is emotionally stable and they ask nothing, but by the time they get to the hospital, it is too late. That is one way that you guess. It is determined in large part genetically — not completely, but in large part.
Another part is your position in the hierarchy. How safe are you in life? Who knows? But one of the ways you guess is by asking if you are good at things. If you are good at things, a problem comes up and you can probably solve it. So how do you know if you are good at things? One answer might be: Other people think you are good at things because you are really kind of comparing yourself to other people when you are thinking about whether or not you are good at things. So if it turns out that you are in a hierarchy — and you are fairly high in the hierarchy, indicating a certain degree of competence — then your nervous system, under the control of the serotonin system, dampens down your negative emotion. It says, “All things considered, you are probably pretty safe.”
However, that also means you do not like having your position in the dominance hierarchy challenged at all. Because if you get tossed down the hierarchy — for example, if you get fired — it wreaks havoc on your serotonin function. It makes you defeated like the defeated lobsters I wrote about in “<a href="https://store.dailywire.com/collections/books/products/12-rules-for-life-an-antidote-to-chaos?_pos=1&amp;_fid=6a4910042&amp;_ss=c" target="_blank" rel="noopener">12 Rules for Life</a>.” Then, you are way more susceptible to negative emotion. And who wants that? That is why you do not even like to lose arguments. You lose a little argument, you slide down the dominance hierarchy a bit, and emotions are a bit destabilized. So instead, you think, “I’m right.” Why? Because you want to keep your neurochemistry in check — and no wonder.
Sometimes, however, it is better to learn than to insist on being right because learning works better for the future. But you get the point.
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To continue, listen or watch more content with Dr. Jordan Peterson on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch">DailyWire+</a>. 
<a href="https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson</a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of &#8220;Maps of Meaning,&#8221; &#8220;12 Rules for Life,&#8221; and &#8220;Beyond Order.&#8221; You can now<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast"> listen to</a> or<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch/jordan-peterson"> watch</a> his popular lectures on DailyWire+.

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Why A Change Of Plans Causes Emotional Destabilization 

Anxiety

Depression

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC0faZiBcG0&amp;t=6s" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Personality and its Transformations</a> lecture series. In this part, he speaks on Carl Jung’s interests in the human imagination and groundings in biology, Nietzsche’s analysis of a value hierarchy collapse, and Freud’s formal study of the unconscious and the primordial motivations most difficult to integrate into the social world.
Start time: 00:01:10
Carl Jung was a strange guy in many ways. Extraordinarily imaginative. He could get lost in daydreams and was a tremendously powerful visualizer and a lot of what he discovered was a consequence of engaging in long-term elaborated fantasies, and in these fantasies, he could have conversations with figures of his imagination and communicate with them. I had a client at one point who was a very prolific dreamer, and she could talk to her characters in her dreams and ask them what they meant symbolically — and they would tell her. That was really something. I have only seen one person who was capable of doing that. I do not know if it helped her that much, in the final analysis, but she could do it.
Jung was very interested in the depths of the human imagination. His body of work can be viewed as an amalgam of many things, but he had deep knowledge of Latin and Greek, and he had studied alchemical manuscripts for many, many years as an older man so he was very interested in the emergence of the idea of science from what he considered the collective imagination. But in many ways, his primary modern intellectual influences, I would say, were [Friedrich] Nietzsche and [Sigmund] Freud. Jung really set out, somewhat like [Jean] Piaget, to address the gap between religion and science, but he did it for different reasons than Piaget.
Jung took Nietzsche’s comments about the death of God very seriously, and one of the things Nietzsche predicted at the end of the 19th century was that there were going to be two major consequences of the collapse of formal religious belief. He believed that would lead people to a morally relativistic condition that would prove psychologically intolerable — because if you adopt a morally relativist position and you take it to its final conclusion, then everything is of equal value, and there is no gradient between things. There is no better, and there is no worse. And, in the final analysis, there is no good and there is no evil, and the problem with that is, you cannot actually orient yourself in a world that has those properties. Because in order to act, you have to be aiming at something that is better than what you have now or there is no reason to expend the energy. So you need the gradient, you need a value differentiation in order to act, and Nietzsche’s analysis was predicated on the idea that if the value hierarchy collapsed, not only would people not be motivated to do anything anymore, but they would also be extraordinarily confused and depressed because the value would go out of their lives. And the consequence of that would be that they would become somewhat nihilistic — or maybe absolutely nihilistic — or that they would turn to rigid ideological systems as a replacement.
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What Nietzsche offered as an alternative was that human beings could create their own values. His idea was that the Superman — the Overman, depending on how you look at it — would be the person who is capable of transcending the valueless universe (that the decline of religion had left with us) and of creating their own values as a conscious act. The problem with that is that it is not obvious that you can create your own values as a conscious act because it is not obvious that values are consciously created. I think this is why the psychoanalysts had so much to add to the philosophical debate — at least, the philosophical debate that developed to the point of Nietzsche’s observations. When Freud entered the scene, the idea of the unconscious was in the air, but Freud formalized it to a much greater degree than anyone else had, and Freud’s theory really is deeply biological. It is biological; it is social as well, but his proposition that there is an Id is fundamentally the proposition that you are not necessarily your consciousness — “not the master in its own house.” 
There are a variety of reasons people like to go after Freud, but one of them is that modern people basically accept radical Freudian presuppositions more or less as givens now. So if you are a brilliant thinker and your thought permeates the society to the point where your most radical propositions are accepted by everyone, all that is really left are your errors. So it is easy to concentrate on Freud’s errors because we have already digested everything he had to say that was particularly profound. Perhaps I am wrong but I do not imagine that there is anyone to whom the news that many of your motivations are not conscious comes as a surprise. Even psychologists have admitted that in the last 20 years. They talk about the cognitive unconscious, which I think is a real sleight-of-hand maneuver to stop them from having to credit Freud with his discoveries, and I also think that Freud’s notion of the unconscious is far more sophisticated than the cognitive scientists’ notion.
Freud viewed the unconscious as a place that was basically populated by fragmented personalities, not cognitive schemes of one form or another, and not processes, but things that were like living beings. You think, “Well, are there living beings in your unconscious?” And the answer to that is, “Well, are you alive or not?” And you are alive, so you are composed of living subcomponents, and they are not machines, or, at least, not in any way that we understand machines. They are fragmentary sub-personalities and each of them has their own worldview, rationalizations, emotional structure, and goals. And so that is why when you are hungry you see the world through the eyes of a hungry person and you think thoughts about food. Your emotional reactions depend on whether the food you want is available or whether it is not; that is nature imposing its necessities on you as a living being. For Freud, that was the Id. Freud thought of the Id really as something that was primordial and primitive and that was one of the things that really separated him from Jung. 
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I think Jung is much more accurate from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. In fact, I think he is radically underestimated as a thinker whose thought was unbelievably deeply grounded in biology. Jung was a remarkable person because his notion of history and the relationship between history and the human psyche covered spans of time that were really [much shorter]. Modern historians and evolutionary psychologists started to talk about “deep time” and the fact that the entire 4-billion-year history of the world is in some sense relevant to us as beings — or at least the 3.5-billion-year history that there has been life on the planet. Ancient history for European philosophers was like 500 to 2,000 years ago, and Jung thought way past that — way back farther than that — and started to take into serious account the fact that the origins of our psyche, the ground of our psyche, is deeply biological.
Freud’s idea of the unconscious is somewhat difficult to understand because there are two elements to it. There is the Id, which is the source of primordial motivation and Freud concentrated mostly on aggression and sexuality. Although he concentrated on what he called the death instinct later in his life, the reason he concentrated on those two primarily was not because he regarded them necessarily as the most compelling of motivations but he regarded those motivations as the ones that were most difficult for most people to integrate successfully into the social world. He thought they were most likely to be repressed and, therefore, underdeveloped and immature. I think that is a reasonable proposition. I think that modern people would have to add eating to that because since the time of Freud we have gone, I would say, from a high proportion of sexually related pathologies to a very high proportion of eating related pathologies (but that is in some sense beside the point). That is one part of the Freudian unconscious, sort of an implicit unconscious, and then the other part of the Freudian unconscious is those things that have happened to you that you have repressed because you do not like what they imply. Those are very different kinds of unconscious because one of them is dependent on your experience and the other is not. 
You can think of Jung as a deep archaeologist of the Id, and Freud thought about the Id in primordial terms so his “angry” Id would be like a beast that is out of control, but Jung recognized that the unconscious is far more sophisticated in many ways than the conscious parts of your being, that it guides your adaptation in ways you do not understand, and that the ways in which it guides your adaptations and structures your understanding are universal, hence biological, and far more sophisticated than a somewhat primordial notion of biological drive might indicate.
To continue, listen or watch more content with Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch" target="_blank" rel="noopener">DailyWire+</a>.
<a href="https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson</a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. You can now<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch/jordan-peterson" target="_blank" rel="noopener">watch</a> his popular lectures on DailyWire+.

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Jung, Nietzsche, And Freud: The Psychoanalysts In Philosophical Debate

Jung, Nietzsche, And Freud: The Psychoanalysts in Philosophical Debate