Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in 12 Rules for Life, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Order, Chaos, and Meaning
Suffering, Evil, and Responsibility
Truth
Knowledge and Wisdom
Character-Building and Hierarchy
Gender and Relationships
Summary
Analysis
Psychotherapy is a conversation. If you listen, you’ll learn surprising things. In his clinical practice, Peterson sometimes spends more time talking or more time listening, depending on the patient. Some of these people have nobody else in the world to talk to. Peterson says it is remarkable how many people really know nothing about themselves and are “desperately waiting for a story about” themselves so that life will make sense.
Peterson returns to his expertise (psychology), describing his work as a sort of dialogue. For Peterson, this dialogue is a key to self-knowledge, which means that lonely people often lack a way to grow in their self-knowledge. Constructing a “story” about themselves helps them gain control of life.
Themes
Peterson says this is why many forms of psychotherapy are helpful. Some people’s psyches are so chaotic that when they adopt “any reasonably orderly system of interpretation,” their lives get better. Whether the structure is Freudian, Jungian, or something else, at least there is something to help pull someone’s life together.
With this overarching goal for psychology in mind, Peterson can see value in many different approaches—the key is establishing order in one’s life, and the method for getting there is secondary.
Themes
Peterson points out that our memory of the past is highly selective. It depends on how much attention we’re paying at a given moment, and how we categorize our experiences. But our picture of the past is never comprehensive, because we simply do not know enough, and we are not objective. These realities cause problems in therapy, when inexpert therapists give hints and make inferences about a patient’s past, forcing facts to fit a theory. This can cause collateral damage. But ultimately, memory isn’t about describing the objective past. It’s a tool “to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over.”
Part of therapy is making sense of one’s past. This isn’t a simple process, because nobody sees their past objectively—and Peterson points out that therapists sometimes make things worse by imposing an ill-fitting framework on a patient’s experiences. In the end, Peterson suggests, therapy isn’t about finding an objective answer, but about figuring out how to make sense of someone’s past in such a way that they can move forward.
Themes
This is why, when Peterson is dealing with a difficult client whose memories seem ambiguous, he often decides to simply listen. Often, this means that a patient leaves without all their questions answered. But it also means that they leave without Peterson imposing an ideology on them.
Peterson suggests that it’s better to leave questions unanswered than to squeeze someone’s story into a framework that might not be appropriate or true to someone's experience.
Themes
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People need to talk through their problems, because that’s how they think: they imagine little fictional versions of themselves and watch what happens to them. True thinking is actually very difficult, because most of what we regard as “thinking” is actually just self-criticism. Real thinking must be a dialogue. You have to both talk and listen to yourself at the same time—which is conflict. That means you have to learn to compromise with yourself, and even to let certain imagined versions of yourself die. Because all of this is so difficult, it’s sometimes easier to collaborate with another person who can help you challenge internal voices.
Peterson expands on the idea that understanding one’s past, indeed one’s whole existence, isn’t a straightforward matter: it’s an imaginative process involving lots of trial and error. This is a form of conflict, which is very difficult to navigate alone and sometimes best handled in the company of someone who can help you separate what’s useful from what isn’t.
Themes
Freud thought that analysts shouldn’t even look at their patients—that they should simply serve as an impassive crowd, so that a patient could freely speak. But Peterson prefers a more personal approach. He tries to clear his mind and aim his motivations at what’s best for his patient, while being aware that he might need to adjust his understanding. Then he listens and lets his patients see his expression and the effects of their words on him, which lets them respond in turn. Having even one person truly listen and then tell you the truth about what they think (which isn’t the same as that person telling you what they think the truth is) can be very powerful.
Peterson sees give and take as vital for a productive patient-therapist relationship. Unsurprisingly, being truthful is key to this process—if you withhold your thoughts from a patient (or other conversation partner), he suggests, you risk destroying the trust between you. Asserting your interpretation of the truth on someone else can be similarly harmful. But being willing to listen and honestly respond to what you hear can go a long way to helping a troubled person sort through their experiences.
Themes
When Peterson talks with clients, he tries to summarize what they’ve said to him and ask them if he’s understood them properly. One of the advantages of this is, obviously, genuinely understanding what the other person has said. But, secondly, it benefits the other person, too: it helps them condense what they’ve said into a useful memory. It then becomes a different memory, but a helpfully distilled one—“the moral of the story.” That, Peterson says, is the whole purpose of memory.
When Peterson says that arriving at a “moral of the story” is memory’s whole purpose, he doesn’t mean that the truth of a memory isn’t important, but that its precise accuracy is less important than the function it ultimately serves—to help someone make sense of their life’s story, moving from chaos to order.
Themes
There are types of conversation that aren’t nearly as useful, however. Sometimes, the speaker is just trying to assert their dominance and place in the group hierarchy. Similarly, sometimes one person is just trying to win a debate, often by denigrating others’ viewpoints and asserting their own (often oversimplified) ideology. Neither of these is a true listening conversation.
Just because conversation can be valuable, however, doesn’t mean that all forms of it are helpful. Here, Peterson gives some familiar examples of ways that people fail to listen to others and thereby ruin the opportunity for a real conversation.
Themes
Peterson repeats that conversation is how people organize their minds. If they can’t do this, “they lose their minds.” What’s more, when others sympathetically listen, the speaker knows that they are worthwhile and valued. Peterson suggests that, generally speaking, this poses a problem in conversations between men and women. Men often want to solve problems quickly and efficiently, and so they don’t listen patiently enough when women try to articulate a problem through conversation.
Peterson presents conversation as vital to mental health, not only because it helps people organize their chaotic thoughts, but because it helps them know where they stand with others. He also suggests that, generally speaking, men and women process conversation differently, and that failing to understand that is a key instigator of conflict.
Themes
Peterson identifies a couple other types of conversation, like lecturing (which, when done well, actually involves careful attention to an audience’s nonverbal cues) and demonstrations of wit (which occur less readily the higher one climbs up the educational and social ladder). But the final type Peterson wants to discuss—itself akin to listening—is “a form of mutual exploration.” This type of conversation demands “true reciprocity” among all parties, a chance for everyone to speak, and a desire to solve a problem together, instead of individuals insisting on their views. Peterson calls such conversation “philosophy, the highest form of thought.”
From his years of experience as a psychologist, Peterson is used to observing social dynamics. For example, he notes that higher on the social ladder, people are often less inclined to engage in humorous battles of wit than their working-class counterparts might enjoy doing. But perhaps the rarest form of conversation is the type that’s a shared search for truth, or philosophical discussion. This doesn’t necessarily mean a rarefied, academic discussion, but any conversation in which people put their egos second to solving a matter of shared concern.
Themes
Every other type of conversation supports “some existing order.” By contrast, a conversation of mutual exploration is willing to take a step into the unknown. It requires each participant to respect each other participant’s experience. You need to assume that they’ve come by their positions honestly, and that they have something to teach you. Participants share the desire for truth, balancing together on the boundary between order and chaos. So, listen to those you’re talking to, because wisdom consists in the ongoing search for knowledge. That means assuming that the person you’re listening to knows something you don’t.
Philosophical discussion ventures from the security of order into the potential disruption of chaos. It demands a lot from every participant—especially the willingness to really listen, to take others at their word, and be willing to learn something new. This is important because it places truth above short-term comfort and expedience (going back to both Rule 7 and Rule 8).
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