Maps of Meaning

University of Toronto PSY230 

Creativity and intelligence are both fundamental traits, part of Big Five Openness, and powerful determinants of innovation and general performance at complex tasks, respectively.

Agreeableness is one of the five canonical Big Five personality traits, made up of Politeness and Compassion on the high end and blunt stubbornness, even callousness on the other. Women are higher in the former, men in the latter. Those differences are largest in the MOST not the LEAST egalitarian societies, in direct contradiction to the social constructionist, neo-Marxist and radical feminist claims. Conservatives are higher in politeness, a form of social convention, than liberals. Liberals are higher than conservatives in compassion.

University of Toronto PSY230 

University of Toronto PSY230 

This lecture opens with the close of a discussion on Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian anti-Marxist, and closes with the opening of a discussion on biological psychology. Got that?

Two potent totalitarian movements emerged in the 20th century: National Socialism and Communism. Both can be viewed as the consequence of existential angst and inauthenticity. Both were supported by the lie.

Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, prophetic thinkers of the late 1800's, foretold the inevitable rise of nihilism and totalitarianism in the bloody 20th century.

University of Toronto PSY230 

Sigmund Freud was the great synthesizer and advocate of the ideas of the unconscious. He gave motivational factors such as lust and aggression primary places in the human psyche, and helped give clear formulation to the idea that the human psyche was made up of oft-conflicting subpersonalities. Furthermore, he was a clear observer of the pathology of the too-close, dependent family, and a great observer of and guide to dreams. For all these reasons, academic psychologists tend to hate and denigrate his achievements.

Carl Jung was one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th century, and the first major post-enlightenment intellectual to consider religious thinking from a truly biological perspective.

The drama of allowing old presuppositions die, and new ones emerge, was represented in heroic and shamanic initiations and then in drama and story long before it was rationally articulated by modern psychoanalysts and psychologists.

Psychological transformation follows a distinct pattern: order, disruption, descent into chaos, restructured order. That's Paradise Lost and Regained. That's the shamanic voyage. It's one of the oldest experiences of mankind.

Before psychology was a science, the essential elements of human personality were captured in ritual, drama, mythology and religion.

An introduction to the great clinical, psychobiological and psychometric models of human personality.

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

University of Toronto PSY434 

Maps of Meaning is a course based on the book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. This lecture describes the perception of meaning as something prior to and distinct from the perception of objects.

University of Toronto PSY434

Maps of Meaning is a university course taught by Dr. Jordan B Peterson. It describes how the world is portrayed in story form in myths, rituals and religious conceptualizations and how that is related to brain function and behavior. In doing so, it presents a solid alternative to nihilism and totalitarianism.

Extraversion and Neuroticism are two of the Big Five Personality traits identified through statistical means in the last forty years. However, as propensity to positive and negative emotion, what they represent can be usefully and straightforwardly mapped on to underlying biological systems governing approach and incentive reward, on the one hand, and threat and anxiety, on the other.