The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale. The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown and would appear to have died.
Dragons have now to be slain and surprising barriers passed—again, again, and again. Meanwhile there will be a multitude of preliminary victories, unsustainable ecstasies and momentary glimpses of the wonderful land.
—JOSEPH CAMPBELL, THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES
Clinically, Jordan Peterson might have been diagnosed as suffering from neurasthenia, more commonly known as a nervous breakdown, when he entered the University of Alberta in 1983 to study psychology. This condition was sometimes attributed to the stresses of modern civilization, such the constant threat of nuclear annihilation.
Carl Jung, the creator of analytical psychology, suffered from apparently the same condition in 1913, as World War I approached. At that time the condition was called hysteria. He experienced a horrible “confrontation with the unconscious.” He hallucinated visions and heard voices. He felt “menaced by a psychosis.”1
Jung had been seeing ghosts since he was a young boy. His mother also saw spirits who came to visit her at night. On one particular night, young Carl saw a ghostly, glowing figure coming from her room with a head detached from the neck and floating in front of the body.2
Sigmund Freud, who had experienced a similar period of hysteria after the death of his father, became an enthusiastic collaborator and supporter as Jung advanced as a practicing psychiatric clinician and writer.
Early in Jordan’s first year Introduction to Psychology course he read Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and was relieved that at least dreams were taken seriously. But he didn’t believe that his nightmares were subconscious wish fulfillments, or coming from a repressed sexual desire. Like Jung, who eventually split from his mentor over this same subject, Jordan felt his dreams were more closely related to a religious experience. He knew Jung had worked extensively on the concepts of myth and religion, and even though his professors generally viewed dream interpretation skeptically, he didn’t have that luxury. He probably felt he was steadily losing his mind and Jung might be the only one who could guide him through his underworld of nightmares.
It was tough going. Jung’s concepts were hard to understand, even the language he used, or the translation of it from his native Swiss-German dialect had terms and phrases that weren’t clear. They needed context and related concepts to begin to make sense. Jordan pressed on. He had no choice, he was beginning to suffer hallucinations of a “voice” that criticized him constantly.
Occasionally, Jung offered a glimmer of hope as in his observation,
It must be admitted that the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious can often assume grotesque and horrible forms in dreams and fantasies, so that even the most hard-boiled rationalist is not immune from shattering nightmares and haunting fears.3
The phrase “archetypal contents of the collective unconscious” was one of those puzzling phrases that needed more investigation but clearly Jung was on Jordan’s wavelength and at least indicating a direction for him. He continued scouring Jung’s writings for more clues.
He found that Jung was an adventurer who freely explored the new and often obscure topics of his time. He studied physics, sociology, and vitalism, the belief discussed among biologists of the time that “living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things.”4
That “non-physical element” that Jung and several biologists believed in and hoped could be scientifically proven was commonly called the soul. They were never successful in proving the existence of a soul. He went even further into unscientific areas like alchemy, astrology, Eastern and Western philosophies, literature, and the arts. To many, Jung was considered a mystic and not a scientist at all. In spite of this, he went on to establish several revolutionary concepts in psychology including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, and the persona.
Jordan said of his first encounter with Jung’s writings around the time he returned from Europe,
I read something by Carl Jung, at about this time, that helped me understand what I was experiencing. It was Jung who formulated the concept of persona: the mask that “feigned individuality.” Adoption of such a mask, according to Jung, allowed each of us—and those around us—to believe that we were authentic.5
What Jordan was referring to was Jung’s quote,
When we analyse the persona we strip off the mask, and discover that what seemed to be individual is at bottom collective; in other words, that the persona was only a mask of the collective psyche. Fundamentally the persona is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be … The persona is a semblance, a two-dimensional reality, to give it a nickname.6
Jordan realized that not only was he isolated in his own dark thoughts, but that his thoughts weren’t really even his own. He was not actually a nineteenth-century Portuguese shepherd any more than he was a tough guy from the far north oilfields. Those were just masks he put on, like the mask of the dutiful son that allowed him to be an acceptable member of his immediate family or a social gang in school. He was, in fact, no one. The pain of this thought deepened his crisis even further. He began to have truly terrifying, gruesome nightmares.
Two or three times a week he would wake up exhausted from a dream so vivid and horrifying that he soon began to fear going to sleep at all. Generally, the dreams had to do with his primary fear of nuclear war. The worms of hysteria had by now burrowed so far into his subconscious that they were affecting his physical health as well. He had no remedy, no weapon to defend himself as his terrified soul began to vomit images.
I was sitting in the darkened basement of this house, in the family room, watching TV, with my cousin Diane, who was in truth—in waking life—the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. A newscaster suddenly interrupted the program. The television picture and sound distorted, and static filled the screen. My cousin stood up and went behind the TV to check the electrical cord. She touched it, and started convulsing and frothing at the mouth, frozen upright by intense current.
A brilliant flash of light from a small window flooded the basement. I rushed upstairs. There was nothing left of the ground floor of the house. It had been completely and cleanly sheared away.… Red and orange flames filled the sky, from horizon to horizon. Nothing was left as far as I could see, except skeletal black ruins sticking up here and there: no houses, no trees, no signs of other human beings or of any life whatsoever.… Some dogs emerged, out from under the basement stairs.… They were standing upright, on their hind legs.… They were carrying plates in front of them, which contained pieces of seared meat.… I took a plate. In the center of it was a circular slab of flesh four inches in diameter and one inch thick, foully cooked, oily, with a marrow bone in the center of it. Where did it come from?
I had a terrible thought. I rushed downstairs to my cousin. The dogs had butchered her, and were offering the meat to the survivors of the disaster.7
Outwardly, Jordan Peterson seemed to be a friendly, well-adjusted if perhaps slightly eccentric college student. There was no hint of his inner turmoil except for a somewhat obsessive focus on books of psychology having to do with dreams. He picked up jobs off-campus in a plywood mill and on the Canadian Pacific railroad that demanded his total concentration and physical effort. He had little room to speculate about nuclear war or the public’s apparent lack of concern about it if he wanted to avoid being mauled by a steel saw or crushed under a locomotive. This physical exercise and complete focus on tasks in front of him may have been the only rest his fragile mind got for over a year.
As James Joyce’s character and alter ego, Stephen Dedalus (Dedalus being the mythological holder of knowledge) said in the author’s novel Ulysses, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”8
Jordan echoed Joyce, saying of this time in his life,
For me, history literally was a nightmare. I wanted above all else at that moment to wake up and make my terrible dreams go away.… I became very depressed and anxious. I had vaguely suicidal thoughts, but mostly wished that everything would just go away. I wanted to lie down on my couch, and sink into it, literally, until only my nose was showing—like the snorkel of a diver above the surface of the water. I found my awareness of things unbearable.
And then things got worse.
I dreamed that I was running through a mall parking lot, trying to escape from something. I was running through the parked cars, opening one door, crawling across the front seat, opening the other, moving to the next. The doors on one car suddenly slammed shut. I was in the passenger seat. The car started to move by itself. A voice said harshly, “There is no way out of here.” I was on a journey, going somewhere I did not want to go. I was not the driver.
Jordan began to feel that there were two planes of his existence. One was the normal, sunlit world of everyday events that he shared with other first-year students in his classes. Here, everyone appeared to have complete self-control. The second was his private shadowy world of secret horrors and crushingly intense emotions where he had no control. This second plane seemed to be behind the first one, the one that everyone accepted as completely real. The one where everyone went about their daily lives assured that they were real people in a real world. But he knew he couldn’t be the only one who lived in two worlds. That was impossible.
And if everyone was just a two-dimensional persona, an image called student or professor so they could fit into their mutual invention called university, was that any more real than the images that made Jordan’s heart race and his head feel like it was splitting open? Was the fact that they could blithely ignore impending nuclear war any more real, any more logical, than the fact that he couldn’t?
He was beginning to fracture along the fault line that was currently called schizophrenia. The world of the living was fading into the distance the longer he continued to drift through the underworld of the dead.
My interest in the Cold War transformed itself into a true obsession. I thought about the suicidal and murderous preparation of that war every minute of every day, from the moment I woke up until the second I went to bed.
As the academic year wore on and Jordan became engaged with students and professors in discussions and debate, activities that he’d always enjoyed, he began to feel odd. It was his voice or something about the words he was using that began to annoy him. Soon, he couldn’t bear to hear himself talk. The criticizing voice hallucination inside his head suddenly spoke up and cut him off, sometimes in midsentence, with a pair of bored, patronizing comments, You don’t believe that, or That isn’t true.
The voice interrupted nearly every phrase he spoke until he was forced to drop out of conversations completely. This jolted Jordan out of his hysteria and confusion about the world he was living in. It forced him to focus instead on this new enemy and, if he was to survive, to prepare for war with it.
The voice was a challenge from the underworld, like the song of the Sirens, that beckoned Jason and his Argonauts toward submerged rocks and death. If Jordan failed and could not somehow defeat the voice, he could lose his battle against madness and remain mute forever—a lonely schizophrenic hounded by voices in his head.
The voice seemed to be a direct attack against his tough guy persona that had heroically fought its way to acceptance in high school using Jordan’s sharp tongue, his primary weapon. He decided he was not going to surrender his only reliable weapon and the persona, real or not, that wielded it, to some patronizing bully from who knows where. As in the ancient stories, an angel, a spirit guide, arrived with a strategy to defeat the voice.
Without any understanding of the primal forces at work, Jordan was suddenly guided by the creative force represented by Athena, the goddess of war, wisdom, and protector of mortal men like Jason and his Argonauts. In the modern world Athena was called Jordan’s feminine aspect. In keeping with her feminine character, Athena would distract and undermine rather than attempt to overpower his enemy. She would envelope the critical, masculine voice in clouds of absolute truth, confusing and denying it any chance to speak. Gradually with disuse, the voice would lose power, weaken, and die. Jordan’s battle position was to stay firmly within the truth. He swore an oath to himself, he thought, that from this moment on, he must never, even for a moment, step away. He must scrutinize every word he intended to say and if he strayed from the truth, even a half step toward exaggeration, he must stop and fight his way back. In this battle, there would be no quarter given. Someone was going to die.
Jordan later wrote,
This meant that I really had to listen to what I was saying, that I spoke much less often, and that I would frequently stop, midway through a sentence, feel embarrassed, and reformulate my thoughts. I soon noticed that I felt much less agitated and more confident when I only said things that the “voice” did not object to. This came as a definite relief.… Nonetheless, it took me a long time to reconcile myself to the idea that almost all my thoughts weren’t real, weren’t true—or, at least, weren’t mine.9
This hard-won habit of truth telling gave him his first small victory against chaos and impending madness. It was then set as a cornerstone of his life. In his future live lectures this practice of stopping midsentence, silently thinking through what he intended to say next and often reformulating it in the moment, persisted. To his students and later his public audiences, this demonstrated his authenticity and exciting spontaneity. In his second book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, he devoted an entire chapter to this principle called Tell the Truth, or At Least Don’t Lie. It is number eight on his list of twelve fundamental rules for living a more meaningful, less distressing life.
He wrote more about this experience in that book:
I started to practice only saying things that the internal voice would not object to. I started to practice telling the truth—or, at least, not lying. I soon learned that such a skill came in very handy when I didn’t know what to do. What should you do, when you don’t know what to do? Tell the truth.10
Truthfulness would prove its absolutely essential value over and over in later years in his clinical practice.
In 1983, while his battle over the truth was still raging inside, he found himself in the deepest part of the beast’s belly. He was surrounded by dozens of paranoid, schizophrenic, and deeply depressed murderers, rapists, and armed robbers near the weight room of the Edmonton Institution, a maximum security federal prison in the northeastern suburbs of the city. It was his first field assignment as a psychology student.
He had accompanied a somewhat eccentric adjunct professor who, when he wasn’t filling in for full professors at the university, was supposed to provide full psychological care to some of Canada’s most violent criminals.
Jordan and the professor must have made quite a distinct impression on the convicts considering that Jordan may have appeared to be also somewhat eccentric dressed, as he again was, in his Portuguese cape and tall leather boots. The professor rather inconveniently disappeared without telling Jordan, leaving the young, caped visitor soon surrounded by large and sinister-looking men. One muscle-bound inmate had a sloppily carved scar running from his collarbone to his midsection, something possibly made with an ax or butcher’s knife. Like most of the prisoners, he was dressed in a thin, ragged uniform, so the Portuguese cape instantly became an item of intense interest. Several of the men immediately offered to trade their clothes for Jordan’s cape, and/or his boots.
With typical dead-pan humor Jordan later recalled, “This did not strike me as a great bargain, but I wasn’t sure how to refuse.”
A short, skinny, bearded man, a demon, arrived just as negotiations were becoming less collegial. The small man said that the professor had sent him. Jordan gratefully escaped from the unplanned swap meet as the two moved outside into the prison yard. The man chatted innocently about everyday things in the low whisper of certain longtime convicts as Jordan continued to glance over his shoulder toward the weight room hoping to see no one else coming. Not soon enough, the absentminded professor appeared and motioned Jordan toward a private office. The small man disappeared as quietly as he had come.
In the office, Jordan’s unsteady guardian mentioned that the little man was a multiple murderer. He had murdered two police officers. According to his detailed court confession, he had calmly watched over them, perhaps chatting idly as he’d just done with Jordan, as the two policemen dug their own graves. One officer pleaded for his life. He had two small children and begged the pleasant little man to spare him for the children’s sake. The little man, brandishing his pistol, suggested that the officer keep digging. When the graves seemed deep enough, the pleasant little man shot the young father and his partner several times to make sure they were both dead. He then went about the relatively easy task of covering them both with the loose dirt of their shallow graves.
Jordan controlled his panic as images of the heartless murder played in his head. It was as if a flock of harpies, the half vulture, half beautiful woman creatures of mythology, had suddenly appeared and were beating their bony wings around him. Panic swelled and subsided like the tide as he saw his friendly little escort become a towering monster shooting fire and death down on terrified men.
How could this be? How could this same innocuous, friendly man who had just saved him from a crowd of dangerous convicts also be a merciless killer? How did that work? It was the same old question of evil. But instead of reading about it or being nauseated by the effects of it forty years after the fact, he’d just been saved by it, chatted with it, and was thankful it had saved him.
The impatiently tapping, slippered foot of the Prince stopped and rested quietly on his footstool for a moment. The Prince stood at his shadowed throne and greeted Jordan. Finally, they’d had an opportunity to meet and chat comfortably about everyday things. At least now they were on speaking terms.
That’s when the compulsion began. Perhaps it was the Prince’s small test of their new friendship. In the amphitheater lecture halls where first-year psychology students sat in semicircular rows above and behind each other, Jordan was always behind some unwitting classmate usually half listening to a professor speak. Casually in the everyday course of his daydreaming, the urge to stab the point of his pen into the neck of the student in front of him flickered by and then disappeared. It was disturbing but not terribly alarming, nothing to discuss, really. He was a good person, a thoughtful person. He’d never been aggressive in his life. But it did set his teeth on edge. After all, he was still wrestling with the demeaning voice that usually kept him carefully watching his words among friends, and was still being shaken awake several nights a week by horrifying, bloody dreams of being roasted alive in a nuclear fire.
This new compulsion seemed to be a psychological flea and easily flicked away. But like an actual flea, it had many relatives who kept up the irritation. His compulsion to attack an innocent classmate increased almost imperceptibly day after day, as if someone was egging him on, probing for a moment of weakness.
About a month later, his classwork took him back to the prison. He found that two prisoners had held down a rat, an informer, and pulverized the bones in one of his legs with a lead pipe. Shocking brutality was a bit less shocking by this time, and the budding psychologist thought he was ready for his own thought experiment.
He would imagine, down to the smallest detail of action and emotion, pulverizing another man’s bones with a pipe. The physical action was clear enough but the feel of worn denim under one hand and cold lead in the other required concentration, and time. The screams of pain would have to be muffled, so an accomplice would be needed, someone strong and equally merciless who would stuff a rag into the victim’s mouth, preferably something foul and sickening. The revolting smells of terror-made sweat and fresh blood would need to become routine, even welcoming to him as he set about destroying a man’s leg with righteous satisfaction. He worked for days on the scenario. From hating the rat in the depths of his soul, to maintaining a neutral or even friendly mask toward him, to snatching him at exactly the right moment in exactly the right spot. It was a chore of criminal planning that took time to visualize accurately. Then there was holding the rat down and breaking the easily bruised, extremely pain-sensitive shin bone with a fierce blow. The second, third, and fourth strikes would shatter the large bone pieces into small, sharp fragments that tore open the muscle and arteries. The rat might bleed to death, die of shock, or choke to death on his own vomit. Either way, he’d never walk on that leg again without pain. Then, of course, would be the deep satisfaction from a job well done and the accolades from the other cons who appreciated a guy willing to uphold the code of silence with violence.
As Jordan focused on becoming a sadist, the nausea felt for classmates who happened to be sitting in front of him became nearly overwhelming as the empathy for them receded. He was now seeing that stabbing the tip of his pen into a fat, complacent neck was a reasonable and forgivable little crime that would provide the tiny taste of evil he needed to end his exhausting theorizing. Then he could finally sleep through the night.
As his visualizations became clearer and his motivations deepened, the time in this altered state of mind stretched from hours, into days, and then over a week.
Finally, eureka! His bloody revenge attack against some nauseatingly weak-minded classmate wouldn’t even be a challenge! He realized with a shock of recognition that it would be easy, and so satisfying. When you get right down to bedrock, he knew he was no different than the friendly little man who had murdered two policemen in cold blood. He could easily manage this.
But there was still the problem of the voice. It was beginning to squawk again, That’s not right. That’s not true. Blah, blah, blah. Annoying little bastard. Always shutting him up, ruining his plans. Who the hell was this little shit, anyway?
Whatever grace or luck or strength of character that kept his vicious hand from actually striking, it probably saved his life. Over the next few hours, Jordan felt his compulsion to attack his fellow classmates gradually fade. It was as if an infection had been lanced and was draining.
Instead of going about with his gaze downcast in a conversation with the shadowed part of himself, he felt himself stand a bit straighter with his gaze again on the world in front of him. With no more inner chatter about the ways and costs of doing evil, his redeeming voice gradually fell silent. This battle was over but its aftermath was not. He was on edge and upset. Clinically, this may have been a condition that was recently renamed post-traumatic stress disorder, but until a few months earlier had been called battle fatigue.
Thinking back on this moment in his life as an experienced clinical psychologist, he wrote,
The behavioral urge had manifested itself in explicit knowledge—had been translated from emotion and image to concrete realization—and had no further “reason” to exist. The “impulse” had only occurred, because of the question I was attempting to answer: “How can men do terrible things to one another?” I meant other men, of course—bad men—but I had still asked the question. There was no reason for me to assume that I would receive a predictable or personally meaningless answer.11
Mythologically, he had passed another more dangerous and more difficult test on his journey through the underworld, just as Jason and the Argonauts had passed through the clashing rocks with only the stern end of their ship getting smashed in the passage—a small, but permanent scar and reminder of the price of failure.
Spiritually, it might be said that he had tasted evil and very nearly swallowed it. Personally, he now had one concrete answer to his endless questions about evil. He had the internal scar to prove that this particular answer would never be found in books or lectures. It had to be earned, personally.
But the Prince apparently did not take Jordan’s rejection lightly. He’d been patient with the young man who was so bright and seemed so enthusiastic. But now, well, the Prince was quite disappointed.
The college drinking party was roaring and Jordan was drinking heavily, as usual. He yelled over the music about God and war and love and other things he didn’t know a lot about, but with great confidence. At some point he noticed that he was embarrassing himself. No one was listening. Everyone was drunk and hoping to have sex with someone hopefully drunker than themselves.
He staggered home disgusted with himself and angry. What an idiot he’d made of himself. After all he had seen and all he had realized, still no one much cared.
Fucking moron. Even though he could now tell firsthand stories about meeting the devil face to face, no one gave a shit. Worthless clod.
He stumbled into his dorm room, slapped up a canvas, and grabbed some paints. Big mouth. He sketched a wobbly, crude picture of a crucified Christ, “glaring and demonic—with a cobra wrapped around his naked waist, like a belt.” He later wrote,
The picture disturbed me—struck me, despite my agnosticism, as sacrilegious. I did not know what it meant, however, or why I had painted it. Where in the world had it come from?12
The Prince may have smiled at that thought. He had made his point and left his calling card. For the evening, the Prince abandoned his drunken prospect to suffer in his well-deserved vomit and crushing hangover. Very soon Jordan had to lay down and rest his throbbing head on the floor.
The next day Jordan was not only hungover but mystified. What the hell was that painting about? He hadn’t thought about Christ on the cross for years. So what exactly was he thinking? He hid the painting under a pile of old clothes in a closet and then sat cross-legged on the floor for a moment.
It became pretty obvious at this time, in spite of his drunken proclamations of the night before, that he didn’t really understand very much about himself or anyone else.
Everything I had once believed about the nature of society and myself had proved false, the world had apparently gone insane, and something strange and frightening was happening in my head.13