Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson

Jordan Bernt Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He began to receive widespread attention in the late 2010s for his views on cultural and political issues. In 2016, Peterson released a series of YouTube videos criticizing the Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. He put his clinical practice and teaching duties on hold by 2018, when he published his second book.

About Jordan Peterson in brief

Summary Jordan PetersonJordan Bernt Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He began to receive widespread attention in the late 2010s for his views on cultural and political issues. In 2016, Peterson released a series of YouTube videos criticizing the Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. He put his clinical practice and teaching duties on hold by 2018, when he published his second book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Peterson has authored or co-authored more than a hundred academic papers and has been cited almost 8,000 times as of mid-2017. He has been active on social media, and in September 2016 he released videos in which he criticized Bill C-16, which would make the use of certain gender pronouns into compelled speech, and related this argument to a general critique of political correctness and identity politics. He worked for the New Democratic Party throughout his teenage years, but grew disenchanted with the party, eventually leaving them at age 18. He saw his experience of disillusionment resonating with George Orwell’s diagnosis, in The Road to Wigan Pier, of \”the intellectual, tweed-wearing middle-class socialist\” who didn’t like the poor; they just hated the rich. He was introduced to the writings of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Ayn Rand by his school librarian Sandy Notley—mother of Rachel Notley, leader of the Alberta New Democratic party and 17th premier of Alberta.

His middle name is Bernt, after his Norwegian great-grandfather, and he was born on 12 June 1962, in Edmonton, Alberta, and grew up in Fairview, a small town in the northwest of the province. In 1985, he moved to Montreal to attend McGill University. He earned his Ph. D. in clinical psychology under the supervision of Robert O. Pihl in 1991, and remained as a post-doctoral fellow at McGill’s Douglas Hospital until June 1993, working with Maurice Dongier. He returned to Canada in 1998 and eventually became a full professor at Toronto. Peterson’s areas of study and research are in the fields of psychopharmacology, clinical, social, personality, industrial and organizational, ideological, political, religious, and ideological psychology. He is currently teaching a class on the topic of God and religion at the university. He also has a clinical practice, seeing about 20 people a week, and has moderated a debate on religion and religion. He recently published a book on the origins of the Cold War; 20th-century European totalitarianism; and the works of Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alekandr Solzenitsyn and Fyodor Dostoevsky. In July 2017, he decided to put the clinical practice on hold as a result of new projects, and stopped teaching as of 2017 and temporarily teaching on a topic of religion and religious psychology.