One of Jordan Peterson’s more intriguing interpretations of Pinocchio centers on the moment when Pinocchio descends into the depths to find and rescue Geppetto, who has been swallowed by the whale. Peterson uses the deliberately provocative phrase “rescue your dead father” to describe the psychological task represented by this scene. Taken literally, the phrase can sound strange, particularly if your father is alive, absent, estranged, or was never someone you admired. But Peterson is using the father in a broader symbolic sense.
None of us begins life from scratch. Long before we are old enough to decide what we believe or who we want to become, we have already absorbed ways of responding to conflict, affection, authority, failure, intimacy, responsibility, uncertainty, and disappointment. We inherit strengths we did not earn and wounds we did not choose. We also inherit stories about what it means to be a man or woman, what marriage is supposed to look like, what success means, what God is like, whom we can trust, and what is expected of us.
Eventually adulthood asks us to examine that inheritance. Some of it deserves to be preserved. Some of it should end with us. Much of it cannot be sorted out until we are willing to look at it honestly.
That is what makes the image of rescuing the father psychologically interesting. Maturity does not consist of unquestioningly accepting the past, but neither does it come from simply repudiating it. The harder task is discerning what was true and good, what was distorted, what continues to influence us, and what deserves to be carried forward.
We Are Shaped by What Came Before Us
People often speak of the past as though it were a collection of events that happened, ended, and now exist only as memories. Psychologically, the past rarely works that neatly. Experiences become expectations, and expectations influence perception. A child who grows up around unpredictable anger may learn to monitor other people constantly for signs of conflict. Someone who receives approval mainly through achievement may reach adulthood still measuring personal worth through accomplishment. A person raised by an emotionally distant father may find himself searching for approval from employers, mentors, spouses, or even his own children without immediately understanding why their approval matters so much.
None of this requires conscious thought. We adapt first and explain ourselves later. Eventually patterns that began as responses to particular circumstances can feel like personality: This is just who I am.
A father does not even have to be physically present to shape the child. Absence can exert its own influence. A son may spend years trying to become the kind of man he imagines his father should have been, or he may organize his identity around never becoming like him. In either case, the father remains psychologically present.
This is one reason simply rejecting the past does not necessarily free us from it. A man can spend his entire life determined to be the opposite of his father while still allowing his father to determine the direction of his life. Every decision remains a reaction. His father moves one way, so he moves the other. That may feel like independence, but psychologically the relationship still governs him.
Genuine freedom requires something more difficult. It requires the ability to say: This was good, and I will keep it. This was destructive, so I will not accept it. This injured me, but it will not control what I become.
That is closer to what it means to rescue the father.
Why Pinocchio Has to Descend
The symbolism becomes even richer when we consider where Geppetto is found. Pinocchio does not find him safely waiting at home. He has to descend into the ocean and enter the belly of the whale. Psychologically, that descent resembles what sometimes happens when we seriously examine our own histories. We discover that experiences we thought were finished remain active in our reactions, relationships, fears, resentments, and choices.
This does not mean therapy should become an endless archaeological excavation of childhood. Understanding the past becomes clinically useful only when it helps explain something that is happening in the present. The goal is not to spend years identifying every injury our parents inflicted upon us. It is to discover whether old experiences are still shaping current behavior in ways we no longer want.
Someone may realize, for example, that his intense reaction to criticism did not begin with his current spouse or employer. He may understand that disagreement has become associated with rejection because of earlier experiences. That insight matters because what once seemed unavoidable can now be recognized as a pattern. But insight alone does not solve it. The real question becomes what he will do the next time he feels criticized.
This is an important distinction in therapy. Understanding why a pattern developed can create freedom, but understanding can also become a sophisticated way of remaining stuck if nothing follows from it. At some point the question must move from “Why did I become this way?” to “Now that I understand it, what am I going to do differently?”
We go back into the past not because we intend to live there, but because there may be something there that needs to be understood, recovered, forgiven, mourned, or finally left behind.
Rescuing the Father Does Not Mean Idealizing Him
This distinction becomes especially important for people whose fathers genuinely failed them. To “rescue” a father does not mean denying abandonment, addiction, cruelty, emotional neglect, irresponsibility, or abuse. Nor does it require inventing admiration for someone who did not behave admirably. Romanticizing a harmful parent is not maturity any more than remaining consumed by resentment is.
The deeper question is whether another person’s failure will continue determining what you become.
A man whose father was emotionally absent may decide that his own children will never have to wonder whether he wants to know them. Someone raised in instability may develop a profound commitment to creating stability in his own home. A person who inherited anger may eventually understand enough about its consequences to refuse to pass that anger into another generation. In each case, the injury remains real, but it does not have to remain sterile. Something can be learned from what should never have happened.
There is also a difficult kind of humility in recognizing that our parents themselves came from somewhere. The father who failed his son may have been the wounded son of another father who failed him. This does not remove responsibility or excuse wrongdoing, but it does complicate the easy division between villains and victims. Human beings usually transmit what they have not understood or resolved.
At some point, however, someone has to decide that a particular pattern does not get passed on to another generation.
That may be one of the deepest meanings of rescuing the father. We recover whatever was worth saving, understand what was broken, and refuse to hand the brokenness forward unchanged.
The Past Explains Us, but It Does Not Have to Rule Us
This is one place where Peterson’s symbolism intersects strongly with how I think about psychotherapy. People sometimes approach the past from one of two extremes. Either childhood explains everything, in which case the person risks becoming a permanent victim of what happened, or the past should not matter at all, in which case the person is told to stop looking backward and simply move on.
Neither position adequately describes human psychology.
Our histories influence us, sometimes profoundly. They shape neural pathways, expectations, emotional reactions, habits, and beliefs about ourselves and others. But influence is not the same as destiny. Understanding the forces that shaped us should increase our freedom to respond differently rather than provide increasingly sophisticated explanations for why change is impossible.
This is why I become concerned when therapeutic language unintentionally encourages people to identify completely with their wounds. A person can learn so much about trauma, attachment, family systems, and childhood conditioning that every present behavior becomes explained by something that happened years ago. The explanations may even be accurate, but if they eventually remove responsibility for what a person does now, therapy has ceased to liberate and has begun to imprison.
The more difficult and more hopeful position is to hold two truths at the same time: What happened to me matters, and I am still responsible for what I do with my life now.
That tension is psychologically demanding because it does not allow us to minimize suffering, but it also does not allow suffering to have permanent authority over the future.
Pinocchio, the Puppet, and the Meaning of Becoming Real
The symbolism of Pinocchio becomes even more powerful when we remember that Pinocchio begins the story as a puppet. A puppet is acted upon. Its movements come from somewhere else. Throughout the story, Pinocchio is repeatedly influenced by temptation, deception, pleasure, fear, and the people around him. Becoming a “real boy” therefore carries a meaning far beyond physical transformation. It represents the development of agency, judgment, responsibility, courage, sacrifice, and the capacity to act according to what is true rather than merely according to the strongest impulse of the moment.
Psychologically, most of us begin life in something like that condition. We are acted upon before we become capable of acting deliberately. Our biology acts upon us. Our parents influence us. Our peers shape us. Fear pushes us in one direction and desire pulls us in another. Over time we become capable of examining those influences and deciding which ones should continue governing us.
Adults can spend enormous amounts of time identifying who pulled their strings: parents, childhood experiences, former spouses, trauma, anxiety, culture, biology, addiction, or social expectations. Some of those explanations may be entirely legitimate. But there eventually comes another question that cannot be avoided: Who is holding the strings now?
Understanding why anger developed does not excuse what a person does when angry. Knowing why intimacy feels dangerous does not repair a marriage. Understanding why alcohol became emotionally useful does not remove its consequences. Recognizing that your father failed you does not answer the question of what kind of father you will become.
This is where self-understanding and responsibility meet. Without understanding, responsibility can become harsh and simplistic. Without responsibility, understanding can become another form of helplessness.
The Christian Pattern Is Redemption, Not Erasure
The Christian connection to this symbolism goes deeper than simply noting that Pinocchio descends into darkness and returns. Christianity itself is structured around a movement of descent, death, and transformation. Christ does not redeem humanity from a safe distance. He enters human history, suffering, betrayal, and death itself. What appears to be the place of absolute defeat becomes, paradoxically, the place from which new life emerges.
This does not mean Christianity teaches that suffering is secretly good or that evil should be minimized. Redemption is meaningful precisely because something real has been damaged. If nothing were broken, there would be nothing to redeem.
That provides a profound way of thinking about personal history. Christian redemption does not require pretending that an absent father was present, that abuse was beneficial, that betrayal did not hurt, or that mistakes did not have consequences. It does not erase history. It asks whether history must have the final word.
Catholic Christianity is especially resistant to the idea that salvation means escaping history. God enters history. He enters a family, a culture, a body, and a particular moment in time. The Christian imagination is therefore comfortable with inheritance. What we receive from those who came before us matters, but inheritance is never merely passive. It can be purified, deepened, repaired, and handed forward differently.
Seen this way, “rescuing the father” does not mean dragging the past intact into the future. It means discovering what can be redeemed.
What Will You Hand Forward?
Every person receives an unfinished story. Some inherit strong families, stable marriages, faith, discipline, sacrifice, and parents whose virtues provide a foundation upon which they can build. Others inherit addiction, abandonment, divorce, anger, emotional distance, fear, or wounds they spend years trying to understand. Most of us inherit some combination of both.
Maturity requires enough honesty to see both sides of the inheritance. If we idealize the past, we cannot learn from what was wrong with it. If we condemn it entirely, we may throw away wisdom along with the injury. The more difficult task is to discriminate: preserve what was good, understand what was broken, forgive where forgiveness is possible, take responsibility where responsibility belongs to us, and refuse to transmit injuries that should end with our generation.
The question becomes especially significant when we have children of our own. At that point the past is no longer only about what happened to us. It becomes a question of what will pass through us. The wounded son may become a wounded father and continue the pattern, or he may finally see clearly enough to interrupt it. That does not require perfection. It requires awareness, humility, responsibility, and the willingness to do something different.
We cannot choose everything that was handed to us, but we have considerably more influence over what we hand forward.
That, I think, gets closer to the psychological and Christian depth of Peterson’s image. To rescue the father is not merely to recover the man who came before us. It is to enter honestly into our inheritance, separate wisdom from injury, and emerge with enough freedom that the past no longer has to repeat itself through us.
Perhaps that is also part of what it means for Pinocchio to become real.
When the Past Is Still Present
Sometimes we know intellectually that the past is over while continuing to respond as though it were still happening. Old family dynamics appear in marriages, childhood fears reappear in professional relationships, and unresolved resentment influences people who had nothing to do with the original wound. In those situations, understanding the past can be useful precisely because the goal is not to remain there. The goal is to understand it well enough that it stops quietly making present-day decisions for us.
If you recognize patterns in your own life that you understand intellectually but continue repeating, you can read more about my approach to individual therapy in Calabasas or begin with my guide to finding a good therapist.
If you would like to discuss whether therapy could be useful for what you are dealing with, you can also schedule a private consultation.
