A friend of mine mentioned reading this last year, and I put it on hold at the library without really wondering too much about what it would end up revealing. He said that it was an interesting look at how the Myers-Briggs test was created, and it certainly was that, but it's also a completely bonkers history of how personality as a concept was thought of from the early twentieth century all the way up until the 21st.
One of the major revelations of the book is that there is practically no scientific basis for any aspects of the test, or of the four major choices that determine whether you're an E or an I, a T or a P, and so on. The questionnaire was created and then revised repeatedly by a mother and then her daughter; the mother, Katherine Briggs, was initially interested in codifying a route to salvation, and then became completely obsessed with the theories of Carl Jung, whose teachings she adapted liberally for her personality indicator. She wrote stories about a Jungian character falling in love with another man, and their tragic fate, and practiced psychoanalysis without any formal training or knowledge beyond what she read in Jung's books on people she knew in her town. She also typed her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, who brought the test to the government during WWII as a part of a training program for spies. It might have easily been lost forever after the war, but it managed to stay alive in various university testing settings for long enough to be resurrected in the 1970s, just in time for the cult of self-actualization courses, and from there it was a perfect fit for the kind of corporate culture matching and sorting.
Myers-Briggs now functions as a sort of scientific-feeling kind of horoscope, one that purports to illuminate aspects of yourself based on static personality traits that don't vary from test to test, or change with age or circumstance. It hold the same kind of appeal of a horoscope, though: an easy to obtain explanation for why you are the way you are, and who else is like you, and what sort of role your fundamental essence makes you ideal for. I found myself both completely appalled by the lack of substance this entire methodology was founded on, and bizarrely proud of these two women, who were upper middle class housewives married to professionals, who managed to create an entirely new belief system simply out of the strength of their own belief in it. And yet the test itself can be used to categorize and limit people in extremely crude and damaging ways, and was built upon fairly regressive beliefs about gender and race and class. I came away from the book feeling like I needed to reject it completely, and also extremely tempted to take the indicator one more time, just to be told who I actually am, by someone with no authority to do so.
Grade: A
One of the major revelations of the book is that there is practically no scientific basis for any aspects of the test, or of the four major choices that determine whether you're an E or an I, a T or a P, and so on. The questionnaire was created and then revised repeatedly by a mother and then her daughter; the mother, Katherine Briggs, was initially interested in codifying a route to salvation, and then became completely obsessed with the theories of Carl Jung, whose teachings she adapted liberally for her personality indicator. She wrote stories about a Jungian character falling in love with another man, and their tragic fate, and practiced psychoanalysis without any formal training or knowledge beyond what she read in Jung's books on people she knew in her town. She also typed her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, who brought the test to the government during WWII as a part of a training program for spies. It might have easily been lost forever after the war, but it managed to stay alive in various university testing settings for long enough to be resurrected in the 1970s, just in time for the cult of self-actualization courses, and from there it was a perfect fit for the kind of corporate culture matching and sorting.
Myers-Briggs now functions as a sort of scientific-feeling kind of horoscope, one that purports to illuminate aspects of yourself based on static personality traits that don't vary from test to test, or change with age or circumstance. It hold the same kind of appeal of a horoscope, though: an easy to obtain explanation for why you are the way you are, and who else is like you, and what sort of role your fundamental essence makes you ideal for. I found myself both completely appalled by the lack of substance this entire methodology was founded on, and bizarrely proud of these two women, who were upper middle class housewives married to professionals, who managed to create an entirely new belief system simply out of the strength of their own belief in it. And yet the test itself can be used to categorize and limit people in extremely crude and damaging ways, and was built upon fairly regressive beliefs about gender and race and class. I came away from the book feeling like I needed to reject it completely, and also extremely tempted to take the indicator one more time, just to be told who I actually am, by someone with no authority to do so.
Grade: A
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