By Merve Emre, Doubleday, 307 pages, $27.95
Merve Emre’s new book begins like a true-crime thriller, with the tantalising suggestion that a number of unsettling revelations are in store. Early in The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing, she recalls the “low-level paranoia” she started to feel as she researched her subject: “Files disappear. Tapes are erased. People begin to watch you.” Archival gatekeepers were by turns controlling and evasive, acting like furtive trustees of terrible secrets. What, she wanted to know, were they trying to hide?
It takes a while to realise that Emre has gotten you hooked under arguably false pretenses, but what she finally pulls off is so inventive and beguiling you can hardly begrudge her for it. The revelations she uncovers are less scandalous than they are affecting and occasionally (and delightfully) bizarre. Emre, a professor of English at Oxford, wrote a previous book on the surge of readers in postwar America, and she knows that a story is inextricable from how it’s told. The Personality Brokers is history that reads like biography that reads like a novel — a fluid narrative that defies expectations and plays against type.
Considering her subject matter, Emre’s heterodox approach is appropriately perverse. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), for the uninitiated few, is an “instrument” — the word “test” is verboten by the centre that distributes it — designed to assess personality in terms of four dichotomies: extroversion (E) or introversion (I); sensing (S) or intuition (N); thinking (T) or feeling (F); and judging (J) or perceiving (P). Corporations use it for personnel management; colleges use it for guidance counselling; individuals use it for self-help.
Books like Annie Murphy Paul’s The Cult of Personality (2004) have examined the MBTI’s insidious social effects, but in The Personality Brokers, it’s more like a MacGuffin, the device that sets the plot in motion. Emre doesn’t trust it; nor does she trash it. It is, she suggests, as idiosyncratic and as fallible as we all are.
The indicator owes its existence to two American women, Katharine Briggs and her only daughter, Isabel Myers, who took the ideas of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung and refracted them through their own interpretations of human behaviour. Neither one was a trained psychologist. A couple of years after Myers was born in 1897, Briggs, in a quest to create “civilised adults,” turned her living room into the fantastically named “cosmic laboratory of baby training,” where she could conduct behavioural experiments on Isabel and the neighbours’ children. Briggs dutifully recorded her observations in a notebook she called The Diary of an Obedience-Curiosity Mother.
Even though obedience and curiosity would seem to be at odds with each other, Briggs — a bundle of contradictions herself — succeeded in inculcating her daughter with both traits. Myers grew up to become inquisitive and well-rounded. As a child, she had a talent for languages, fiction (she would later write a best-selling novel), stenography and, apparently, metal-making. “What a housekeeper that child would make!” a proud Briggs announced in her diary. As it happened, Myers would later become a doting parent but a stubbornly indifferent homemaker, much to the consternation of her husband, who was jealous of Isabel’s devotion to her indicator and would call her “Mrs Executive.”
She would always, however, remain unfailingly loyal to her mother, no matter how often Briggs — lovingly, unthinkingly — would undermine her achievements. Obsessed with Jungian typology, Briggs may have created the precursor to the indicator (a “personality paint box”), but Myers was the one who developed it in earnest during the Second World War, even insisting on calling it the Briggs-Myers Type Indicator, with Katharine’s last name first. (The names would eventually be reversed, to rescue the acronym from beginning with an unfortunate “BM.”)
Emre describes Briggs as “irritated” by the indicator; she thought of Jungian typology as more exalted than whatever could be captured by a lowly “scientific” questionnaire. But Myers’ creation would flourish, especially when corporations and government agencies got wind of it. Myers pitched the indicator as a way for them to maintain order in their growing ranks. The idea behind it was simple, harmonious and irresistibly win-win: Employees wouldn’t raise a ruckus if they were placed in a job that suited their type. “Each type has its own special advantages,” Myers wrote, in emphatic boldface, in the first published version of the questionnaire.
The Personality Brokers contains a judicious amount of historical context. We learn, for instance, how the Office of Strategic Services requested the first set of Myers’ test booklets during the war’s final year, for use on its covert operatives, and how Truman Capote (extroverted, feeling) and literary critic Kenneth Burke (introverted, thinking) became increasingly irritated with each other in front of an amused psychologist.
But it’s Briggs and Myers who are at the core of this story, and Emre depicts these two women — long dead and largely unknown — with the acuity they deserve. Myers, in particular, is drawn with precise, confident strokes. There she is in her mid-60s, skipping to the podium in front of an audience of eminent psychologists. There she is again, roaming the hallways of the testing service that employed her, her breath sour with the scent of her homemade energy drink (milk, brewer’s yeast, melted Hershey’s bar). There she is at home, an elderly lady chafing at the condescension of a 27-year-old statistician with whom she was forced to work, compiling a secret file on his various misdeeds with the forthright title, Larry Stricker, Damn Him.
So much for the sweet magnanimity of “each type has its own special advantages.” But if there’s a theme in The Personality Brokers, woven throughout and never belabored, it’s that the self is more slippery than we allow.
The same goes for the indicator that Emre set out to examine. She felt the thin clarity of her reflexive scepticism thicken into something richer and more complicated; what she once derided as a mass-produced tool of social control also, she realised, offered people a chance to understand themselves and one another. Delving into this strange world, Emre became freer the deeper she went. “The language of type does not just liquidate the individual,” she writes. “It liberates her too.”
–New York Times News Service
