An ABC of Childhood Tragedy: Volume 1

Product Information

This isn't necessarily what readers have come to expect from Jordan Peterson's work. His prior books include a deep (and admittedly fairly dry) academic text on mythology and belief structures and two works that fit within (even as they rise above) the self-help genre. This is something entirely different: a short collection of twenty-six brief poems, each of which is accompanied by an illustration by Juliette Fogra. Wives, ask your husbands: What bothered you more, the terrible prose, the poor centering, the general sense of gesture without meaning, or the fact that the author is a bigot who talks like Kermit the Frog? (It’s OK, you can be honest.) I'm actually seeing Jordan Peterson live soon. I'm not a huge fan, but I think it'll be an alright use of an evening. Somehow he's selling out stadiums. The hype is insane. I wonder if he'll recite some poetry. This alphabetical collection of four sentence rhymes revels in the torture of children with no purpose or payoff. The author-- a licensed psychologist from clown college-- clearly has a disdain for his patients, particularly youths, and secretly practices on the belief that they deserve the abuse they have endured. Peterson is a narcissist with aspirations of eugenics. These are quite literally stereotypical tropes as stories. Then justifying it as abuse towards children.

Let's create a hypothetical scenario where you and your spouse are shopping for child-safe content. We're going with a male / female coupling because statistically speaking if you are on the LGBTQ+ spectrum or a single parent of any kind you will probably dismiss the book outright. However, while it's not structurally like anything else Peterson has written, followers of his work will recognize a common thread. Much (not all) of what he's written about involves the psychological toll of tragedy and trauma, particularly that inflicted during childhood. This book, while far from an academic treatise on the subject, provides a more visceral look at the topic, as each of the poems contain within their few lines a haunting revelation of the tragedies children all too often endure.Indeed, readers of these genres will be equally attracted to this book as readers of Peterson's work in general. I've long argued that there is great psychological benefit in studying horror fiction (and related topics, including the darkest case studies in psychology or the most tragic moments in history) because they prepare us psychologically for the often-terrifying reality of the world in which we live, and remind us to be grateful when the world is anything but horrible. This book seems to come from a similar idea, and I think it should be applauded for its effort. More haunting still is the realization that, though of course the cases are fictionalized and rendered in poetic form, they're inspired by Peterson's decades of clinical work. The individual children depicted may never have existed (at least under the names they're given in the book), but at the very least they represent an amalgamation of the horrors Peterson has witnessed throughout his career, and that fact alone ought to justify a study of this book. 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. Even though the content of his poems can be a bit disturbing, I don't think the subject is wrong in itself. There are lots of books, even intended for children (this one isn't, I think), that deal with the subject of abuse: Matilda was abused by her parents; Harry Potter by his uncle, aunt and cousin; the Baudelaire orphans by Count Olaf and his henchmen; and so on. Each verse has a simple rhyme pattern and uses lots of alliteration. Many of the rhymes don't really work. Like he rhymes "own/groaned" "them/men". Some nice word choices with the alliterations to demonstrate a large vocabulary.

I also don't care -at least, not in regards to this book- about Peterson's ideology or questionable ideas about parenting. There are way better poets with way worse ideas. Here, I just want to talk about the quality of Peterson's writing. Let's consider one of the most anodyne poems in his book:

Preview Book

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.