To obtain a hard copy of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®), the most popular personality test in the world, one must first spend $1,695 on a week-long certification program run by the Myers & Briggs Foundation of Gainesville, Florida.

This year alone, there have been close to 100 certification sessions in cities ranging from New York to Pasadena, Minneapolis, Portland, Houston, and the Foundation's hometown of Gainesville, where participants get a $200 discount for making their way south to the belly of the beast. It is not unusual for sessions to sell out months in advance. People come from all over the world to get certified.

In New York last April, there were twenty-five aspiring MBTI practitioners in attendance. There was a British oil executive who lived for the half the year under martial law in Equatorial Guinea. There was a pretty blonde astrologist from Australia, determined to invest in herself now that her US work visa was about to expire. There was a Department of Defense administrator, a gruff woman who wore flowing skirts and rainbow rimmed glasses, and a portly IBM manager turned high school basketball coach. There were three college counselors, five HR reps, and a half-dozen "executive talent managers" from Fortune 500 companies. Finally, there was me.

I was in an unusual position that week: Attending the certification program had not been my idea. Rather, I had been told that MBTI certification was a prerequisite to accessing the personal papers of Isabel Briggs Myers, a woman about whom very little is known except that she designed the type indicator in the final days of World War II. Part of our collective ignorance about Myers stems from how profoundly her personal history has been eclipsed by her creation, in much the same way that the name "Frankenstein" has come to stand in for the monster and not his creator.

Flip through the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, and you will find the indicator used to debate what makes an employee a good "fit" for her job, or to determine the leadership styles of presidential candidates. Open a browser, and you will find the indicator adapted for addictive pop psychology quizzes by BuzzFeed and Thought Catalog. Enroll in college, work an office job, enlist in the military, join the clergy, fill out an online dating profile, and you will encounter the type indicator in one guise or another — to match a person to her ideal office job or to her ideal romantic partner.

Yet though her creation is everywhere, Myers and the details of her life's work are curiously absent from the public record. Not a single independent biography is in print today. Not one article details how Myers, an award-winning mystery writer who possessed no formal training in psychology or sociology, concocted a test routinely deployed by 89 of the Fortune 100 companies, the US government, hundreds of universities, and online dating sites like Perfect Match, Project Evolove and Type Tango. And not one expert in the field of psychometric testing, a $500 million industry with over 2,500 different tests on offer in the US alone, can explain why Myers-Briggs has so thoroughly surpassed its competition, emerging as a household name on par with the Atkins Diet or The Secret.

Our collective ignorance about Isabel Briggs Myers stems from how profoundly her history is eclipsed by her creation

Less obvious at first, and then wholly undeniable, is how hard the present-day guardians of the type indicator work to shield Myers's personal and professional history from critical scrutiny. For the foundation, as well as for its for-profit-research-arm, the Center for Applications of Psychological Type (CAPT), this means keeping journalists far away from Myers's notebooks, correspondences and research materials, which are stored in the Special Collections division of the University of Florida library. Although they are technically the property of the university — thus open to the public — Myers's papers require permission from CAPT to access; permission that has not been granted to anyone in the decade since the papers were donated to the university by Myers's granddaughter, Katharine Hughes. Twice I was warned by the university librarian, a kind and rueful man, that CAPT was "very invested in protecting Isabel's image." Why her image should need protection, I did not yet understand.

When I wrote to CAPT in August 2014, I received an enthusiastically officious email from their Director of Research Operations, requesting additional details about my interest in type indicator and a book I was planning to write on personality testing. "Will there be descriptions and historical background about other personality tests in addition to the MBTI instrument?" she wrote. "If so, we would like to be informed." So began nine months of correspondence with the staff of CAPT, which culminated this April in their request that I become a certified administrator of the MBTI instrument. Certification was a necessary precursor to giving me access to the papers, the director told me over the phone. CAPT would even be willing to consider "possibilities for funding the training."

This is how I found myself in the company of the oil man, the astrologist, the Department of Defense administrator and twenty other people at the certification workshop, located on the sixth floor conference room of the United Jewish Appeal Federation building on East 59th Street. We sat at tables of five or six, our backs pressed against a smoked-glass wall decorated with etchings of Seder plates, unfurling braids of challah, and half lit menorahs. Each of us wore a name tag with our first name, last name, and our four letter type printed on it in big block letters. It was not unusual for people to lead with their type when they introduced themselves.

I said hello to the woman sitting next to me. Her name tag said "Laurie — ENFJ."

Laurie checked me out and sighed, relieved. "We're both E's," she said. "We'll get along great."

The most important part of becoming MBTI certified is learning to speak type," declares Barbara, our instructor for the next week and a self-proclaimed "clear ENTJ." Dressed in black, with prominent red toenails and a commanding nasal tone, Barb, as she insists we call her, will teach us how to "speak type fluently."

"This is only the beginning!" Barb says. "Just think of this as a language immersion program."



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The comparison is an apt one. There are sixteen types, each made up of a combination of four different letters. Each letter represents one of two poles in a strict dichotomy of human behavior. From the pre-training test I took earlier in the week, I learn that, like Barb, I too am an "ENTJ." I prefer extraversion (E) to introversion (I), intuition (N) to sensing (S), thinking (T) to feeling (F), and judging (J) to perception (P). It is strange, this tidy division of myself into these alien categories. Initially, I have trouble keeping the letters straight. Strange too is the ease with which people around me speak their types, as if declaring oneself a "clear ENTJ" or a "borderline ISFP" were the most natural thing in the world.

Of course, speaking type is anything but natural. Still Barb's job is to convince us that this simple system of thought can account for the messiness of many of our personal and interpersonal relationships, regardless of gender, race, class, age, language, education, or any of the other intricacies of human existence. Type is intensely democratizing in its vision of the world, weird and wonderful in its commitment to flattening the material differences between people only to construct new and imaginary borders around the self. Its populism is most clearly demonstrated by MBTI's astonishing geographic reach: Last year, two million people took the test, in seventy different countries, and in 21 languages. "As long as you have a seventh grade reading level and you're a 'normal' person" — by which Barb means, you are not mentally ill or blithely psychopathic — "you can learn to speak type."

Across all languages and continents, however, the first rule of speaking type remains the same. You do not, under any circumstances, refer to MBTI as a "test." It is a "self-reporting instrument" or, more succinctly, an "indicator." "People use the word 'test' all the time," Barb complains. "But what you're taking is an indicator. It's indicating based on what you told the test."

Although her statement sounds tautological, Barb assures us that it is not. Unlike a standardized test, like the SAT, which asks the test taker to choose between objectively right and wrong answers, the MBTI instrument has no right or wrong answers, only competing preferences. Take, for instance, two questions from the test I took last April: "In reading for pleasure, do you: (A) Enjoy odd or original ways of saying things; or; (B) Like writers to say exactly what they mean." And: "If you were a teacher, would you rather teach: (A) Fact courses, or; (B) Courses involving theory?" And unlike the SAT, in which a higher score is always more desirable than a lower one, there are no better or worse types. All types, Barb announces rapturously, are created equal.

The indicator's sole measure of success, then, is how well the test aligns with your perception of your self: Do you agree with your designated type? If you don't, the problem lies not with the indicator, but with you. Maybe you were in a "work mindset when you answered the questions," Barb suggests. Or you had become unusually adept at "veiling your preferences" to suit the wants and needs of your husband or wife, your co-workers, your children. Whatever the case may be, somehow you were inhibited from answering the questions as your "shoes off self" — Isabel Briggs Myers's term for the authentic you.

All personality tests invite a bit of self-deception, for it's deception that legitimates the test

More cynically, what this seems to mean is that the indicator can never be wrong. No matter how forcefully one may protest their type, the indicator's only claim is that it holds a mirror up to your psyche. Behind all the pseudo-scientific talk of "instruments" and "indicators" is a simple, but subtle, truth: the test reflects whatever version of your self you want it to reflect. If what you want is to see yourself as odd or original or factual and direct, it only requires a little bit of imagination to nudge the test in the right direction, to rig the outcome ahead of time. I do not mean this in any overtly manipulative sense. Most people do not lie outright, for to do so would be to shatter the illusion of self-discovery that the test projects. I mean, quite simply, that to succeed, a personality test must introduce the test taker to the preferred version of her self — a far cry, in many cases, from the "shoes off," authentic you.

But Barb doesn't pause to meditate on the language lesson she has started to give us. Instead she projects onto a large screen behind her a photograph of a pale and bespectacled man in a neat cravat. Peering over us is Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist whose 654-page study Psychological Types (1923) inspired Myers's development of the indicator. Jung was "all about Freud, the couch, neurosis!" Barb laughs. For the purposes of our training, the relationship between his theory of psychological types and Myers's commodification of it is a matter of good branding strategy. "Jung is a very respected name, a big name," Barb says. "Even if you don't know who he was, know his name. His name gives the test validity."

Validity is crucial to selling the test, even if it doesn't mean exactly what Barb seems to think it does. After the certification session is over, the participants will return to work with a 5-by-7 diploma, a brass "MBTI" pin, and a stack of promotional materials that they are encouraged to use to persuade their clients or colleagues to take an MBTI assessment. Each test costs $49.95 per person, more if you want a full breakdown of your type, and even more if you want an MBTI-certified consultant to debrief your type with you. No one questions the sheer ingenuity of this sales scheme. We are paying $1,695 to attend a course that authorizes us to recruit others to buy a product — a product which tells us nothing more than what we already know about ourselves.

Although Barb invokes Jung's name with pride and a touch of awe, Jung would likely be greatly displeased, if not embarrassed, by his long-standing association with the indicator. The history of his involvement with Myers begins not with Isabel, but with her mother Katharine Cook Briggs, whom Barb mentions only in passing. After the photograph of Jung, Barb projects onto the screen a photograph of Katharine, unsmiling and broad necked and severely coiffed. "I usually don't get into this," she says, gesturing at Katharine's solemn face. "People have already bought into the instrument."

Yet Katharine is an interesting woman, a woman who might have interested Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem or any second-wave feminist eager to dismantle the opposition between "the happy modern housewife" and the "unhappy careerist." A stay-at-home mother and wife who had once studied horticulture at Michigan Agricultural College, Katharine was determined to approach motherhood like an elaborate plant growth experiment: a controlled study in which she could trace how a series of environmental conditions would affect the personality traits her children expressed. In 1897, Isabel emerged — her mother's first subject. From the day of her birth until the child's thirteenth birthday, Katharine kept a leather-bound diary of Isabel's developments, which she pseudonymously titled The Life of Suzanne. In it, she painstakingly recorded the influence that different levels of feeding, cuddling, cooing, playing, reading, and spanking had on Isabel's "life and character."

Today we might think of Katharine as the original helicopter parent: hawkish and over-present in her maternal ministrations. But in 1909, Katharine's objectification of her daughter answered feminist Ellen Key's resounding call for a new and more scientific approach to "the vocation of motherhood." More progressive still was how Katharine marshaled the data she had collected on Isabel to write a series of thirty-three articles in The Ladies Home Journal on the science of childrearing. These articles, which were intended to help other mothers systematize their childcare routines, boasted such single-minded titles as "Why I Believe the Home Is the Best School" and "Why I Find Children Slow in Their School Work." Each appeared under the genteel nom de plume "Elizabeth Childe."

It is not surprising that Jung's work should pique the interest of "Elizabeth Childe," an aspiring pedagogue who perceived the maturation of her child's personality as nothing less than an experimental form to be cultivated, even perfected, over the years. Indeed, Katharine first encountered an English translation of Jung's Psychological Types in 1923, when she was editing The Life of Suzanne to submit to publishers. She found Psychological Types an unwieldy text, part clinical assessment, part romantic meditation on the nature of the human soul, which emphasized the "creative fantasy" required for psychological thought. Katharine took this as an invitation to start thinking of her children's personalities as divided into three oppositional axes: extraverted versus introverted, intuitive versus sensory, thinking versus feeling. In 1927, she wrote to Jung to express her feverish admiration for his work — her "Bible," she called it — and her desire to bring a more practical approach to his densely theoretical observations, which her "children … had been greatly helped by."

Jung would likely be displeased, if not embarrassed, by his association with the indicator

"How wasteful children are, even with their own precious, irreplaceable lives!" Jung once wrote to Freud, a letter that might have doubled as his irritated response to Katharine and her request to collaborate. From the outset, it seems that Jung was impressed by Katharine's brilliance and flattered by her enthusiasm, but skeptical of her eagerness to bring his typology to the science of childrearing. When Katharine wrote to him for advice about a neighborhood child, a young girl in great emotional distress who she believed she could cure through Jungian type analysis, Jung rebuked her for overstepping her bounds as a dispassionate observer. "You overdid it," he wrote. "You wanted to help, which is an encroachment upon the will of others. Your attitude ought to be that of one who offers an opportunity that can be taken or rejected. Otherwise you are most likely to get in trouble. It is so because man is not fundamentally good, almost half of him is a devil."

Despite Jung's unwillingness to help Katharine see beyond the devil in man, some of the more practical applications of his typology appeared in a 1926 article that Katharine published in The New Republic, winningly titled "Meet Yourself: How to Use the Personality Paint Box." In it, she would present Jung's dichotomies as an elegant paint-by-numbers exercise, in which E/I, N/S, and T/F were the "primary character colors" that each individual could "combine and blend" to form "his own personality portrait." Even babies, those "little bundles of psychic energy," had types, and the sooner a mother identified her child's type, the better it was for his mental maturity. "One need not be a psychologist in order to collect and identify types any more than one needs to be a botanist to collect and identify plants," Katharine assured her fellow mothers. There was no need to doubt one's ability to type one's child.

"Meet Yourself" enjoyed quiet acclaim among parents when it was first published, but ultimately, Katharine's desire to spread Jung's gospel to a broader audience would inspire a shift in genre. She would abandon The Life of Suzanne as a parenting guide and turn instead to fiction, which she believed would help her reach a larger and more dedicated audience. Her longest work, written toward the end of her life, was a romance novel inspired by Psychological Types called The Guesser, the story of a love affair between two incompatible Jungian types. It was summarily rejected by ten publishers and two film producers for dwelling too much on Jung, whom no one other than Katharine was interested in, and not enough on love.



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Like her mother, Isabel also began her adult life as a wife and mother. She graduated from Swarthmore in June of 1918 — Phi Beta Kappa, an aspiring fiction writer, and a moderately disillusioned newlywed, who had followed her husband first to Memphis, where he was training as a bomber pilot, and then to Philadelphia, where he enrolled in law school. In each city, she made a list of her future goals in a notebook which she titled Diary of an Introvert Determined to Extrovert, Write, & Have a Lot of Children.

Keep complete job list and do one every day.

Housekeep till 10 A.M.

Two hours writing.

One hour outdoors.

One hour self-development—music, study, friends.

Wash face with soap every night.

Never wear anything soiled.

But despite her clear goals and clean clothes, Isabel struggled to find a job. After an unfulfilling stint at a temp agency, she wrote to Katharine to complain about the difficulties of finding meaning in one's work, particularly as a married woman who was expected to do nothing more than to have children. "I think under the spur of necessity a woman can do a man's work as well as he can, provided she is as capable for a woman as he is for a man," she wrote. "But I'm perfectly sure that it takes more out of her. And it's a waste of life to spend yourself on work that someone else can do at less cost. I'm sure men and women are made differently, with different gifts and different kids of strengths." In a perfect world, she concluded, there would exist "some highly intelligent division of labor that can be worked out, so everybody works, but not at the wrong things."

Isabel's "instinctive answer" to the question of what to do with herself was to be "my man's helpmeet." And for nearly a decade she was. Until 1928, she did housework, gave birth to two children, and at night, when the house was in order and the children were asleep, she continued to wonder what was missing from her life. Although a husband and children and a "beloved little ivy-covered colonial house" in the suburbs were "everything in the world that I wanted," Isabel wrote, "I knew I wanted something else." That something else was the time and energy to pursue a career as a successful fiction writer, something her mother had never been able to realize. "In the evenings, between nine and three, stretched six heavenly, uninterrupted hours — if I could stay awake to use them," she mused.

If Isabel started her life as her mother's experiment, she quickly grew into her apostle

Working at night, but most often with one fitful child or another in her lap, Isabel started and finished a detective novel, which she promptly submitted to a mystery contest at New McClure's magazine. The winner was to receive a $7,500 cash prize (over $100,000 today) and a book contract with a prominent New York publisher. Katharine, apparently jealous that her daughter was trying to succeed where she had once failed, had little encouragement for her daughter, only what Isabel lamented as some "cool criticisms" of the "novel's style." Much to her mother's surprise, Isabel's novel, Murder Yet to Come, took first place, surpassing the writing team behind the Ellery Queen novels, among the many other seasoned pulp writers who had vied for the prize.

Yet there was plenty of reason for Katharine, ever the devoted scholar of Jung, to appreciate how she had inculcated her daughter into speaking — or, in this case, writing — type. Unlike other detective stories of the time, which often pair a brilliantly imaginative sleuth with a more literal minded sidekick, Murder Yet to Come features a team of three amateur detectives: an effeminate playwright, his dutiful assistant, and a brawny Army sergeant. Unburdened by crying children or any other domestic responsibilities, they set out to solve a gruesome murder. Each member of the team possesses what Isabel, in her letter to her mother, described as "different gifts and different kinds of strengths." The playwright has the "quickness of insight" to uncover the murderer's identity, the sergeant takes "smashingly, effective action" to apprehend him, while the assistant makes "slow, solid decisions" that protect the family of the victim from scandal. None of the detectives "works at the wrong things." Like today's slick police procedurals, in which there are the people who investigate the crime and those who prosecute the offenders, every character in Murder Yet to Come is designed to maximize the efficiency of the team.

As a mystery story, Murder Yet to Come is decidedly second-rate; the villain predictable, his motive commonplace, the detectives flat and uncharismatic. But as a testing ground for the Myers-Briggs type indicator, the novel is a remarkably direct receptacle for Isabel's ideas about work, right down to its crude division of gender roles between the feminized playwright and the hyper-masculine military man. Strengths and weaknesses are distributed in a zero-sum fashion; the character who possesses a keen eye for sensory details reverts to a slow, stuttering imbecile when asked to abstract larger patterns from his observations. Friendships and working relationships are always invigorated by personality differences, never strained by them. And for death-defying detectives, the characters are all unusually self-aware, each happy to accept his personal limitations and cede authority to others when necessary, like cogs in a well-oiled machine. Reprinted by CAPT in 1995, Murder Yet to Come showcases characters who are "beautifully consistent with type portraits," according to the forward to the new edition. "Those readers who know type will enjoy 'typing them' as the mystery progresses."

CAPT's website, where I purchased Murder Yet to Come for $15.00, claims that the novel was Isabel's "only sojourn into fiction" before she shifted her attention to the type indicator. This is incorrect. The company has not reprinted Isabel's second novel, Give Me Death (1934), which revisits the same trio of detectives half a decade later. Perhaps this is due to the novel's virulently racist plot: One by one, members of a land-owning Southern family begin committing suicide when they are led to believe that "there is in [our] veins a strain of Negro blood." Despite their differences, the detectives agree that it is "better for [the family] to be dead" than for them to be alive, heedlessly reproducing with white people.

Give Me Death is more explicitly about the preservation of the family, but saddled with a far more sinister understanding of type: Type as racially determined. There is talk of eugenics. There is much hand wringing about the preservation of Southern family dynasties, about "honor" and "esteem." That the novel was written in the years when laws forbidding interracial marriage were increasingly the target of ACLU and NAACP protests makes it all the more reactionary, and thus all the more unsuitable, from an image management perspective, for reissue today. One would hardly enjoy "typing" these characters.

If Isabel had started her life as her mother's experiment, she had quickly grown into Katharine's student, her apostle, and even her competition. Fiction had presented one way for her to unite her mother's talk of type with the intelligent division of labor, ordering imaginary characters into a rational system with a profitable end: bringing criminals to justice. After World War II, the emergent industry of personality testing would give Isabel the opportunity to organize — and experiment on — real people.

The second rule of speaking type is: Personality is an innate characteristic, something fixed since birth and immutable, like eye color or right-handedness. "You have to buy into the idea that type never changes," Barb says, speaking slowly and emphasizing each word so that we may remember and repeat this mantra — "Type Never Changes" — to our future clients. "We will brand this into your brain," she vows. "The theory behind the instrument supports the fact that you are born with a four letter preference. If you hear someone say, 'My type changed,' they are not correct."

Of all the questionable assumptions that prop up the Myers-Briggs indicator, this one strikes me as the shakiest: that you are "born with a four letter preference," a reductive blueprint for how to move through life's infinite and varied challenges. Many other personality indicators, ranging in complexity from zodiac signs to online dating questionnaires to Harry Potter's sorting hat, share the assumption that personality is fixed in one form or another. And yet the belief of a singular and essential self has always seemed to me an irresistibly attractive fiction: One that insists on seeing each of us as a coherent human being, inclined to behave in predictable ways no matter what circumstances surround us. There is, after all, a certain narcissistic beauty to the idea that we are whole. "If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald of his greatest creation, Jay Gatsby, in the same year that Katharine fell under the sway of Psychological Types. Learning to speak type means learning to link the quotidian gestures of life into an easily digestible story, one capable of communicating to perfect strangers some sense of who you are and why you do what you do.

Yet the impulse to treat personality as innate is, in no small part, a convenient way of putting these gorgeously complete people in their rightful places. Just as each one of Isabel's three detectives serves a unique purpose in her novels, a way of moving the plot forward that follows from his innate "gifts," so too does the indicator imagine that each person will fall into their designated niche in a high-functioning and productive social order. This is another fiction — to my mind, a dystopian fiction — that most personality tests trade in: The fantasy of rational organization, and, in particular, the rational organization of labor. "The MBTI will put your personality to work!" promises a career assessment flier from Arizona State University, a promise that is echoed by thousands of leadership guides, self-help books, LinkedIn profiles, and job listings, the promise that underwrites such darkly futuristic films as Divergent or Blade Runner. To live under an economic system that is not organized by personality, thinks the heroine of Divergent, is "not just to live in poverty and discomfort; it is to live divorced from society, separated from the most important thing in life: community."

Or as a trainee belts out in the middle of an exercise, "Team work makes the dream work!"

There is, after all, a certain narcissistic beauty to the idea that we are whole

This commitment to rational organization is also why the Myers-Briggs indicator doesn't care whether you have a good personality or a bad personality, whether you're kind and generous or a duplicitous ass. Given Jung's conviction that "almost half of man is a devil," all those who wield the instrument really care about is putting those devils to work as good team players, cheerfully committed to whatever kind of task the indicator claims is right for their type. For companies today, "business is all about the participative management of things," Barb says. "The old command-and-control approach doesn't work. You have to bring feeling into it." To feel that you are ideally suited to do your job means to do it well and, more important, to do it willingly — without complaining. MBTI convinces employers and employees alike that everywhere is exactly where they are meant to be.

Barb finds dozens of ways to intertwine the fiction of the complete self with the fiction of the happy, hard-working team. I am grouped with others of my type and prodded to swap stories, to marvel at the shared patterns in our "communication methods," our "leadership styles," our "decision making profiles." At first, I try to stay as quiet as possible so that I can take notes from a distance. After all, I am only here to get to the archive. But the invitation to talk about yourself, to pick yourself apart and have a room of strangers put you back together in a calm and reasoned way, is difficult to forgo, even for the introverts among us, which I most certainly am not. Sometimes I answer questions sincerely and am rewarded with overtures of friendship; the trainees are hungry to bond with others who are like them and thus understand who they are. Other times I play an extreme version of my "ENTJ" self — brash, snobby, impatient, cocksure, a real bitch — to see who I can irritate and how far I can push my fellow trainees.



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This comes to a head on the third day of training, when Barb thrusts a dry-erase marker and a large sheet of paper at each of us and announces that we are to draw our personalities as rooms. "What kind of room best represents who you are? Use your imagination!" she laughs, striking the same false note of enthusiasm one often hears in the voices of nannies or schoolteachers long fed up with their charges. I am cranky and annoyed by the assignment. I consider drawing the Red Room of Pain from Fifty Shades of Grey, but I can't figure out whether cartoon nudity will get me kicked out of the training. Instead, I draw a stick figure with luscious hair and x's for eyes parachuting onto a tent in the wilderness, a tent flanked on all sides by ravenous wolves, which look more like fat hamsters with saw toothed fangs. I am confident that this image I have created will defy interpretation.

I am wrong. Barb circles my drawing warily and asks me to explain. I do without straying from the literal: parachute, tent, wolves. Her wariness disappears. She begins to nod and smile. "This makes a lot of sense," she says. "ENTJs are our leaders, our CEO types. Like this parachuter, you want to come in from the top and make all the decisions. You love taking risks."

I decide to play along. "And the wolves are all the people who want to get in my way," I say, only a little bit menacingly. The other trainees have started to look at me suspiciously, like my drawing gives them all the confirmation they need to know that I am, in fact, not a "good team player."

The next room/personality belongs to my antithesis in training: an executive talent manager from the UK named Michael, who speaks in a clipped accent and bares teeth too small for his mouth. According to a story he will tell us later that day, Michael is so good at managing people that a man he once fired later thanked him for the unexpected opportunity to "self-actualize," a happy occurrence because there's nothing Michael detests more than people who "play the victim." This morning, however, Michael has sketched in fine and elaborate detail a nineteenth century British sitting room, which he has furnished with upholstered chairs, brandy decanters, and a wall covered with portraits.

As Barb admires his work, Michael points to the largest of the miniature profiles he has drawn, the one that looms over a leather reading chair. "This is a portrait of Dorian Gray," he announces. His reference is to Oscar Wilde's ageless libertine, a fictional character who sells his soul to pursue beauty and sensual fulfillment for eternity. "I put it there," Michael explains, "because Dorian's portrait captured him at his most perfect, but also to remind myself that he got uglier because his ego got in the way of him appreciating other people."

This is not exactly true — really, it's not true at all — but no one seems to care. The other trainees beam and applaud the point. True to Katharine's vision of the "personality paint box," Michael has stepped back from his portrait and met his ESFJ self. No doubt he likes what he sees.

To understand what the Myers-Briggs indicator is today, you must first understand what it was when Isabel debuted it on July 1, 1943. Although her career as a writer of detective fiction had ended abruptly and unceremoniously after Give Me Death, one mystery continued to preoccupy her: the problem of the "highly intelligent division of labor." In the early 1940s, few people were better equipped to help Isabel tackle this problem than Edward N. Hay, a family friend of Isabel's and one of the first management consultants to set up shop in the US, long before the term "management consultant" became a trendy and lucrative career path. It was Hay that Isabel approached in 1942, once her children had left for college and the demands of motherhood no longer weighed on her daily life. And it was through Hay that Isabel first encountered in her professional life the "people-sorting instruments" that would soon colonize the psychological livelihoods of workers everywhere.

With the rise of the labor force during and after World War II, newly established consultancies like Hay's were warming to the idea of using cheap, standardized tests to fit the worker to job, a love match made under the watchful eyes of executives eager to keep both profits and morale high. In this romantic capitalist pursuit, they were guided by tests with charmingly blatant titles. The Thurstone Temperament Schedule, The Personality Inventory, The Personal Audit, How to Supervise — all of these promised to help corporations manage the influx of millions of new workers into the workforce, the majority of whom were women like Isabel and veterans who had enrolled in college after the GI Bill passed in 1944.

Such was the backdrop against which Isabel first presented Hay with a thumbnail description of the type indicator and its four categories in 1943. Her memo to him began as so many good stories do, with a frustrated woman, an inscrutable man, and the promise of happily ever after. "The more you can know about what a man is like, the more effectively you can work with him, or under him," she wrote. The double entendre only helped make her point: Choosing an employer was much like choosing a mate. Although an employer could find out "by trial and error, where his strengths and weaknesses lie," this would prove "a time-consuming and sometimes painful process," like a woman "trying on all the shoes in a shoe store to find a fit. If men came like shoes, with the most vital data as to size and style marked outside the box, many a cramping misfit could be averted."

Applicants to Silicon Valley start-ups are asked to take a Myers-Briggs test, only to be weeded out based on their type

Here was a fairy tale with a peculiarly modern twist — the glass slipper screened, scrutinized, and labeled before it ever touched Cinderella's foot. "The most logical answer" to the painful problem of fit and misfit, Isabel proposed, "lies in the work of Dr. Carl J. Jung of Zurich" and his "four basic 'functions' of the mind": introversion/extraversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and finally, judgement/perception, not technically one of Jung's categories. An individual's preferences for each function could be "picked out by a questionnaire-form-Type Indicator," a 117-question test which would then present his "personality pattern" in the familiar shape of a four-letter profile. But this was only half the story. Before such workplace harmony was attainable, it was first necessary to determine if the type indicator could do what it purported to do. To this end, Isabel beseeched Hay to secure the "cooperation of key people" already working in corporations, "where 'proof of the pudding' is available in their known fitness for the job."

In 1947, already a fifty-six-year-old man with outsized ambitions and excellent connections, Hay was quick to advertise the type indicator to his high-profile client list, which counted in its ranks General Electric, Standard Oil, Bell Telephone, the National Bureau of Statistics, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, and several high ranking US army officials. These organizations were among the first to provide Isabel and Hay with test subjects in the form of employees: good employees, bad employees, and even employees who had been fired years ago were now ordered to return to the office to undergo a battery of tests; the type indicator, of course, but also IQ tests and job dissatisfaction surveys, all of which Isabel and Hay used to launch a "double-barreled attack upon [job] turnover."

"When a man is in a type-suitable job, he does not project his general dissatisfactions, if any, upon the job," Isabel concluded firmly in a 1949 survey of 550 employees of A.R. Laney's Washington Gas Light Company. As she had hypothesized to Laney, type-suitability was crucial to his employees' job performances. Those jobs "requiring close concentration, as accounting and other clerical work" were best suited to introverts. Extraverts proved to be more adept "meter readers and mechanics." She encouraged him to reassign or fire people accordingly.

In theory, there is no greater ethical violation than using the indicator as Isabel and Hay once did, normatively, and without the protective shield of anonymity to keep employers from retaliating against their employees. In practice, not everyone who makes use of the indicator is so conscientious — one in five of the Fortune 1000 companies uses personality testing to screen job candidates. I have heard bemused stories of how applicants to elite, cultish hedge funds and Silicon Valley startups are asked to take a Myers-Briggs test early in their job searches, only to be weeded out as unfavorable candidates based on their type. I have heard of managers who exploit personality profiles, invoking type to bully, shame, and strong-arm their employees. Employees, for their part, have little recourse. Ironically, personality testing's status as a pseudo-science — as opposed to a hard science, like DNA or medical testing — means that there are no legal safeguards in place that protect employees from discrimination based on type.

Type shaming is a common complaint amongst the trainees. "Learning my type was mortifying,"" one woman confesses. "My boss outed me as an introvert and a feeler on a team of extraverts and thinkers. People freaked out." Barb soothes her, but ultimately, encourages us not to dwell on the abuses of type. CAPT, we are told, bears no responsibility for unethical uses of the indicator. Once it is let loose on the world, what people do with it is their business.



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Reading through the earliest drafts of the type indicator, now carefully filed away in Hay's personal papers at Cornell University, I am perhaps more surprised than I should be by its racial overtones, its sexism.

I learn that the racial typologies that shadow Give Me Death also haunted Isabel's assessments of people's types. Only now her racialized judgements were dressed up in the language of psychoanalytic authority. When a female office worker advocated for human equality across all races and ethnicities, Isabel declared her to be immature and typologically under-developed. "The very warm evidence on the colored woman to whom one could talk exactly as to equals is another case in point," she wrote. "Members of a dark and supposedly inferior race are standard symbol for the suppressed and considered-inferior part of one's own psyche."

Was Isabel a casual racist or a mere cultural observer, unwittingly invoking the language of her time to debate issues of identity? Are these two ways of thinking and talking about race even separable from one another? It is hard to answer these questions based solely on her letters to Hay. But Whether decidedly inferior or not, for Isabel, the "colored woman" was not a person but a lesser projection of the white office worker's psyche. In a long letter to Hay, Isabel criticized the office worker's "fervent insistence upon the symbolically true proposition" that "everybody is equal, of equal value, with equal prospects for development." Symbolically, all men may have been created equal. In reality, equality seemed an impossible aspiration for a personality test that was constructed in 1947.

I learn that, in the beginning, men's and women's questionnaire results were evaluated on notably different scoring scales, particularly when it came to the thinking (T) and feeling (F) functions. These, it was assumed, were differently accessible to men versus women. Isabel was hardly the first person to suggest that women, as a matter of biological destiny, set greater store by "sympathy" and "appreciation" than men, who were more logically inclined in their decision making. She was, however, one of the first to institute this difference in workplace evaluations.

"Quite a few questions prove to be effective for only one sex," she wrote to Hay when she presented him with two separate scoring keys for the indicator — the standard key and a "female key," weighted to account for their innate vulnerability to feeling. Later versions of the questionnaire would provide distinct breakdowns of personality profiles, one "Valid for Men," the other "Valid for Women." Unsurprising, then, that women were more often type-suited to the caring professions, as nurses, teachers, and secretaries, rather than executives and managers. Destiny wasn't biological; it was typological.

Equality seemed an impossible aspiration for a personality test that was constructed in 1947

I begin to suspect that more revelations of this kind are waiting for me in Isabel's papers. To my mind, these ugly truths begin to explain CAPT's excessive caginess. I suspect, too, that such retrograde assumptions about human behavior continue to plague the indicator, albeit in subtler and more implicit ways.

In training, I share my mistrust of the test — I now insist on calling it a test as small act of rebellion — with Wesley, a 30-year-old career counselor at Bethel University, an evangelical Christian college in Arden Hills, Minnesota. Wesley is brave enough to raise the question of the indicator's biases to the room. After our drawing exercise, he gives a small and respectful speech, pointing out that the type indicator and its personality profiles are only "representative of the white, male leaders of the US" But at an institution like Bethel, 70 percent of Wesley's students are women, international students, underrepresented minorities, and first-generation college attendees, many of whom see the dangers endemic to "managing other human beings." How, he asks Barb, can Myers-Briggs or any other personality test speak to his students' experiences and their aspirations?

Barb does not appear to appreciate the question. "That's the pool they're going to be swimming in," she says, dismissing Wesley's concerns and his students with a nervous shrug. "It may not be the worst thing in the world for them to learn how to adapt to it."

"What about the way things like introversion are used to discriminate against women in the workplace?" rasps a laryngitic consultant named Larissa.

"And what if what you want is to change the underlying system?" asks Ashley, one of only two black women in training.

"I don't want to go there," Barb snaps.

Is the test a joke? A scam? Every six months or so a reputable news source publishes what it takes to be a devastating critique of the type indicator. Consider such recent titles as "The Mysterious Popularity of the Meaningless Myers-Briggs, Nothing Personal: The Questionable Myers-Briggs Test, and Goodbye to MBTI, the Fad That Won't Die. The skeptics who write these pieces tend to repeat the same arguments. They say the instrument is unreliable, that people often get different results when they take it from one week to the next. They say the type descriptions are loose and baggy enough to fit anyone, a flagrant example of circus man P.T. Barnum's observation that the best hoaxes are the ones that have "got something for everybody." They deride the test's origins as the hobby of two untrained women, even though they seem to have only the faintest sense for what its history really is.

But on the last day of training, the room brims with true believers. The Department of Defense representative confides in me that the training has helped make sense of a rather contentious divorce. Gerry, a middle aged IT executive who is here with Laurie and their younger co-worker Jody, whispers that the training has given him the language to justify to the two women why he doesn't enjoy office gossip — they're E's, he's an I, and he'd rather just keep to himself. The blonde astrologist and I chat about Jung while we wait for the bathroom. "Jung's my boy!" she shouts, before inviting me to have coffee with her so that we may continue to "network." Later that week, she will reveal that the training has given her the confidence to start looking for new jobs. She knows now that she belongs in customer relations, not product management.

What stops us from saying our final goodbyes to MBTI? At first, I thought it was inertia, the same happy passivity that stops us from demanding that the Village Voice eliminate its daily horoscopes. I believed that over the course of just a few decades, the indicator had morphed from a nifty experiment into company policy so unobtrusively, so seamlessly, that it never made sense to question its use. In retrospect, it seems to me that the question of type's staying power is less interesting than how type wins you over: The quasi-religious appeals it makes to your sense of wanting to know who you are and why you do what you do.

Critics deride the test's origins as the hobby of two untrained women, even though they have only the faintest sense for its real history

For some, it is with the promise of self-awareness, that most precious of human commodities. Self-awareness is the sine qua non of training, a state of mind that the blonde astrologist describes quite passionately as a "chance for spiritual and emotional development." Too often, to be a self-aware person means that one can be a tyrannical, impatient, elitist, misogynistic, secretly racist, self-indulgent boor who is admirably aware of his shortcomings. In an age when self-awareness functions as an adequate justification for all sorts of bad behavior — "He's an asshole, but at least he's self-aware," I hear more than one person say about their husband, their boss, their co-worker — the shallow knowledge peddled by the indicator can seem more appealing than more chaotic processes of self-excavation, ones that don't fit neatly into a 4-by-4 chart or a four-letter acronym. And yet, for many of the trainees, these four days present what seems like a rare opportunity to confront themselves, to speak their truths in a strange and useful tongue.

For others, type seems to function as a kind of fateful crutch. They use it to justify whatever needs justification: decisions they have or haven't made, fights they have or haven't resolved, abandoned careers and spouses and dreams. More times than I care to count, one of my fellow trainees begins a sentence by disavowing her ability to do something because of her type. "I'm an N, so I just can't see the details," one woman says matter-of-factly to me, as we complete an exercise in which we have 30 seconds to list everything we see in a kitschy painting that Barb has projected onto the screen. This strikes me as a sad capitulation to a reality that isn't real at all. When I explain this to a friend of mine, a former management consultant, she describes to me how her colleagues would repeatedly appeal to their types to explain their childishness, their lack of self-control. "When I murder someone," she would joke to her boss, "I'm just going to say, 'Well, what did you expect? I'm an ISFP!'"

This is not to discredit the true believers. I witness flashes of epiphany in training that are not, in any sense of the word, untrue. I see things fall into place. A consultant named Sarah suddenly understands why she and her mother fight when they cook. "When I ask my mom for a recipe, she says, 'Just a dash of this, just a dash of that,'" Sarah says. "But I'm like — Ma, how much is that? Give me a real measurement." When Barb leads us through the differences between J's (people who prefer to organize their time systematically) and P's (those who prefer spontaneity), many of the women in the room have a story about planning a trip to Disney World with their families. "I just got back from Disney World and I really realized the difference between me and my husband," says Jody, who sits across the table from me. "When we're there, he plans it all out — the way I plan out the kids' schedules at home." Someone else chimes in, "When we went to Disney World, I forced myself to act as J as possible. That's just what you need to do to survive there." Everyone laughs. In this moment, we are all true believers.



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One week after the training has finished, I write to CAPT to share news of my successful certification. I ask when I can come to Gainesville to look through the archive. For days there is silence, and then an unapologetic letter from the Director informing me that CAPT has decided to close the archive to all outside researchers. Her explanation is long and convoluted and contradicts everything I have been told by CAPT for the past nine months — how they've set aside stacks of letters for me to read, how excited they are to host me in Florida when it's winter in New York. She ends by encouraging me to purchase more CPP products and hopes that I will be an enthusiastic user of the type indicator for many years to come. I write back, asking if we can revisit the issue in the future. This time, there is only silence.

I am angry at first and then, immediately, paranoid. Did I overplay my ENTJ persona to the point of arousing serious suspicion? Was there a mole in training, someone who watched me and reported back on my movements, my agreeable nods and smiles, my single eyebrow raises, my quiet smirks? Was it Wesley? Was it Laurie? Was it Barb? My friends have theories of their own. One is convinced they never intended to give me access once they pegged me as a left-leaning, anti-corporate critic. Another jokes that they simply didn't trust an ENTJ. "You're all too critical," he says. Most are vicariously frustrated that I have been led on for nearly a year, forced to jump through hoops by a corporation with something to hide, the kind of corporation that limits access to papers donated to a public research university.

On the one hand, CAPT's reluctance to open the archive would seem to confirm my darkest suspicion: That there lurks some ugly secret behind the history of the type indicator that they want to keep locked and buried. On the other is my sense that the history I have pieced together here, and the curious experiences that I have lived in the process of doing so, are not so easily reducible to the ugly or the uplifting.

It may be most accurate to say that there are things I know and things I don't. I know that the history of type begins with two women, each of them eager to find, within the constraints of marriage and motherhood, some different way of bringing meaning to their lives. I know that those women are admirable in some ways and deplorable in others. I know that the remarkable success of the Myers-Briggs indicator, above all other personality tests, depended on the shared conviction of millions of people and organizations — companies, universities, government agencies — that work could be more than just a way of sustaining one's livelihood. I know that that transformation continues to exert a great and undue influence on how we think about who we are and what we do, in ways that are rarely just or ethical or especially accurate.

More unexpected is what I now know about personality. I know that it occupies some dream state between fiction and a reality. I know that its fictions infiltrate our lives in ways we do not always perceive — every time we decide whether to let a stranger become a friend or a lover, every time we conclude that someone possesses a good personality or a bad one. I know that the reality of personality is inescapable, and that many of the people I met in training will make irrevocable decisions about their lives based on the truths they believe are encoded in four simple letters. And while I may not know what lies in wait in Isabel Briggs Myers's papers, I no longer need her ugly secrets, her stray revelations, to grasp the significance of my type or yours.





Editor: Steve Rousseau; Fact-checker: Tova Carlin

The author stopped by to discuss her article — read the comments here.