The Personality Brokers summary

The modern-day publishers of the MBTI, CPP, make no secret of the fact that Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers based their work on the writings of one of the most famous psychologists of the twentieth century, Carl Jung. Proponents of Myers-Briggs would have us believe that this theoretical underpinning is a mark of distinction. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll find that Jung’s theories were more fiction than fact.

For much of her adult life, Katharine Briggs was interested in the idea that personality was innate, unchangeable and classifiable, believing that everyone is born with a distinct personality type. However, it was only when she read Jung’s work that her questionnaire began to take shape. Psychological Types, published in 1921, in which Jung argues that people’s souls are made up of opposing and opposite natural spirits was particularly influential.

There’s no doubt Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers were inspired by the work of Carl Jung. What’s not so well known is that Carl Jung was more than an inspiration for the MBTI – he was an all-consuming personal obsession for Katharine Briggs.

During the years that she spent designing the earliest iteration of her personality questionnaire, Briggs began to revere Jung as an almost divine oracle.

After spending five years in deep contemplation of Carl Jung’s writings, Katharine Briggs turned her attention outward with a plan to bring Jung’s theories to the wider American public. This first incarnation of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was a magazine article entitled “Meet Yourself: How to Use the Personality Paintbox,” published in the New Republic in 1926.

In the article, Briggs represented each one of the 16 distinct personality types with a different color in the personality paint box. In order to meet your true self, she explained, you needed to discover which color fits you best by writing down each one of Jung’s personality types on index cards and arranging them in the order of which described you the best.

As the Second World War ravaged Europe, Isabel Myers was busy working on the personality type indicator that her mother had begun to develop twenty years earlier. In Nazi Germany, Hitler’s soldiers had begun transporting Jews to concentration camps. The practice of sorting people into groups began to mean something far more deadly.

Isabel Myers envisioned the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a benign system for helping people to better know themselves, but to a growing number of social theorists, typing people’s personalities in this way was far from harmless.

By 1980, both Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers had passed away, but their creation lives on. More than two million of us take their type indicator every year, and the MBTI is an industry worth more than two billion dollars, spanning over 20 languages and 25 countries. However, whether this is a cause for concern or celebration remains unclear.

Unsurprisingly, for many rational and scientifically minded people, it’s the former. Ultimately, the theory underpinning the MBTI has no grounding in clinical psychology. And it shows. Recent psychological studies have found that over half of all individuals who repeat the test more than once, even less than a month apart, are categorized as a different personality type the second time around. Furthermore, critics argue that the 16 different personality types are so loosely defined that each one could fit anybody.