Jordan B. Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, self-help writer, cultural critic, and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. His main areas of study are in abnormal, social, and personality psychology, with a particular interest in the psychology of religious and ideological belief, and the assessment and improvement of personality and performance.

Peterson grew up in Fairview, Alberta. He earned a B.A. degree in political science in 1982 and a degree in psychology in 1984, both from the University of Alberta, and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from McGill University in 1991. He remained at McGill as a post-doctoral fellow for two years before moving to Massachusetts, where he worked as an assistant and an associate professor in the psychology department at Harvard University. In 1998, he moved to the University of Toronto as a full professor. He authored Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief in 1999, a work in which examined several academic fields to describe the structure of systems of beliefs and myths, their role in the regulation of emotion, creation of meaning, and motivation for genocide.

In 2016, Peterson released a series of videos on his YouTube channel in which he criticized the Canadian government's Bill C-16. He subsequently became involved in several public debates about the bill that received significant media coverage.

Why have people from different cultures and eras formulated myths and stories with similar structures? What does this similarity tell us about the mind, morality, and the structure of the world itself? Maps of Meaning offers a provocative new hypothesis that explores the connection between what modern neuropsychology tells us about the brain and what rituals, myths and religious stories have long narrated. Drawing insights from the worlds of neuropsychology, cognitive science, and Freudian and Jungian approaches to mythology and narrative, Jordan B. Peterson argues that myths and religious stories have a structure determined by the nature of the mind, and play a key role in the regulation of human emotions.

Ambitious in scope and daring in its exploration of ideas, Maps of Meaning presents a rich theory that makes the wisdom and meaning of myth accessible to the critical modern mind.</P>