saturday feature ALLOWS TO INTRODUCE MYSELF

How Katharine Briggs ushered in the era of self-help by formalizing the experience of self-discovery (with a little help from Carl Jung)

Whether on a corporate retreat or killing time on the internet, who among us hasn’t quenched their thirst for self knowledge through a Myers-Briggs personality test? You know the one. (How very ISFJ of you to pretend otherwise.) Referenced in everything from elementary schools to dating apps, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator has been the de facto personality test for generations. In Merve Emre’s new book, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing, the author goes in-depth on the fascinating history behind Myers-Briggs. Emre introduces us to the mother-daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, a pair of homemakers who made up for their lack of formal training in psychology by perceiving an unexpressed desire within human beings for self-affirming answers to the question of self-knowledge. Originally designed to popularize the writings of Carl Jung, the type indicator took on a life of its own, honed by some of the 20th century’s greatest creative minds as it travelled around the world. In this excerpt from The Personality Brokers, Emre brings the reader along as Briggs introduces an early version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, with all its early Jungian influence, to readers of The New Republic. In offering personality types to a public fascinated by the idea of self-discovery, Briggs was not only laying the foundation for Myers-Briggs, she was ushering in a new era of popular psychology.

Katharine Briggs’s first magazine article in nearly a decade, “Meet Yourself: How to Use the Personality Paint Box,” spoke to readers of her conversion experience to Jungian psychology. The article appeared in the New Republic in December 1926, its title a combination of the profound and the prosaic. One could hear echoes of the maxim inscribed in gold letters on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi — “Know thyself ” — and the dawning of a deep and revelatory self-consciousness. One could also hear an invitation to a children’s game of arts and crafts. To meet oneself, she explained, was to embark on an epic journey of self-discovery whose end was not some abstract notion of truth or freedom but one of Jung’s sixteen personality types — “sixteen ways of growing from infancy to maturity,” she wrote. Each type was represented by a different shade in the “personality paint box” of life. To discover the shade that best suited you, Katharine urged her reader to write down each type and its traits on a 3 in × 5 in index card, spread the cards across a flat surface, and arrange them vertically from most descriptive to least descriptive.

Later, Isabel Briggs Myers would further standardize the work of self-discovery with a questionnaire, but for now, Katharine believed that her readers possessed enough self-awareness to navigate her descriptions of Jung’s types on their own, sliding index cards up and down their dining room tables. The extraverted (E) sensing (S) type was an “extreme realist,” she summarized, “valuing above all material possession and concrete enjoyment.” The extraverted (E) intuitive (N) was an impatient and fickle-hearted “explorer, inventor, organizer, or promoter” who sought opportunity and adventure. Introverted (I) intuitives (N) could be found among the world’s “philosophers, religious leaders and prophets, artists, queer geniuses and cranks.” Their impulsive attitudes were counterbalanced by the practicality of the extraverted (E) thinkers (T), the “reformers, executives, systematists, and men of applied science.” If her reader recognized himself in one of these descriptions, he was to move the index card to the very top of the table, where it would stay until it was displaced by another, more appropriate type description.

In its insistence on selfdiscovery as a civilizing form of self-mastery, “Meet Yourself ” modelled a new genre of writing known as popular psychology: self-help in an era when the public demand for psychological counsel far outstripped the number of psychologists available to provide it. In the decade after Freud had published The Interpretation of Dreams, hundreds of newspaper columns and radio programs sought to address the problems they perceived as common to American society in the Roaring Twenties: inattentive spouses who drank on the sly; misbehaving children who bobbed their hair and hemmed their skirts and listened to jazz; professional ennui and personal paralysis in the face of a rising consumer culture. For Katharine, such advice might have once come from a trusted member of her church. But modern people, she observed, did not want judgment, repentance, or absolution, the rigmarole of religious instruction. They wanted understanding and they wanted it on their own terms. “Fortunate are they who can use the path of prayer,” wrote Joseph Jastrow, president of the American Psychological Association and author of the nationally syndicated column Keeping Mentally Fit. “There is little need to advise that path for those who tread it; for they do so of their own accord. But the psychologist, like all other men, knows many who find their codes and creeds in other directions; so he must speak to and for all.”

To find one’s codes and creeds — this was the promise of meeting yourself through Jung’s type theory. Type was no parlour game, no frivolous exercise designed to sort people into simplistic and overdetermined categories. It was an opportunity to articulate a grand system of self-governance, a system beyond conventional notions of good and evil, beyond God, and beyond the laws of the land. It was a system in which one’s personality — one’s self — was the ultimate arbiter of what was right and what was wrong. The only person who could judge you was you, and you, Katharine reassured her readers, had little “choice or control” in the matter. She knew from her observations of her children that type was set at birth, forged in the dreamlike chaos of infancy. “Every one of us is born either an extravert or an introvert, and remains extravert and introvert to the end of his days,” Katharine wrote. To meet oneself was to cast aside all other codes and creeds and to acquire a new conception of “wholesome living,” a new basis for the happy acceptance of one’s life.

In writing “Meet Yourself,” Katharine had placed her finger on the nerve centre of type’s appeal: the promise that, within each person, there lived a coherent individual who was master of her own life. This was by no means an original sentiment. Western philosophy had, for centuries, set forth a similar argument, from the Socratic dialogues to the writings of the Cynics, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and even the early Christians. In 1734, Alexander Pope had started his poem “An Essay on Man” with the command “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, / The proper study of mankind is Man.” In 1750, Benjamin Franklin, one of Katharine’s heroes, had quipped, “There are three things extremely hard, Steel, a Diamond, and to know one’s self.” In 1831, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet whose work had inspired William James’s theory of a personal religion, urged each person to “know thyself ” so that he might find the “God in thee.” Katharine’s article was just the most recent node in a long intellectual tradition that stretched across the Atlantic and back. But in the pages of the New Republic, the idea of meeting yourself was presented in a tone of definitive, cheerful accessibility that made the journey to self-discovery seem accessible — fun, even. The unearthing of one’s personality was no laboratory science, no serious invitation to navel-gaze. It was a human art of the most pleasing kind, and it could be practiced by just about anyone. “We may now assemble our personality paint box,” Katharine concluded, “and try to discover just how we, our families, and our friends have managed to mix the colours.”

Katharine’s personality paint box was literalized in the figure of a 2 × 2 box — the first and simplest type table, a precursor to the now famous 4 × 4 grid of the sixteen Myers-Briggs types. “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 comforted her readers, lest they felt intimidated by the specialized language she had used to populate her type table. One had only to learn to recognize the different characteristics of extraverted and introverted sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking to determine which function served as “master” over one’s personality. Once a reader had located her “primary function” in the personality paint box, then she could identify her “childish function” in the box directly opposite, the function that was “sometimes useful, sometimes a liability, sometimes a revolting anarchist.”

Of all the shades in the personality paint box, one appeared brighter to Katharine than all the others: intuition. It was a wholly abstract concept to her. One could not touch or taste or see intuition at work, she thought, and yet one often heard people declare with great certainty that intuition was the key to genius. “A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way,” proclaimed Albert Einstein in 1926, the same year Katharine gathered her courage and wrote the first of many letters she would send to Jung. The letter did not read like a conventional fan letter. It was serious, probing. She asked him to clarify what precisely intuition was and why, on page 547 of Psychological Types, he had referred to it as “the noblest gift of man.” His partiality to intuition had struck her as a moment of unrestrained passion in his writing, a rare slip in his persona as a clinician.

His lack of restraint had thrilled and puzzled her, she confessed to him, not because she believed herself to be an intuitive type, although she suspected they had that in common, but because she thought she had caught a glimpse of his soul across the thousands of miles that separated them. Perhaps, she speculated, it had something to do with his special esteem for women’s intuition. This was a psychic factor she had started thinking about in relation to her old project of baby training: women always seemed to know when the people they loved were in danger. Perhaps intuition was as evolutionarily encoded as loving one’s children. Perhaps it was the intuitives, like him and her, who would inherit the earth.

She never expected an answer to her questions, so she was surprised when Jung wrote back, a long letter from his home at Küsnacht, Switzerland, three pages overflowing with his wide, slanted hand. How different his penmanship was from Lyman’s cribbed little letters, his perfectly measured lines! And yet how authoritative, how uncompromising, his words seemed! “Dear Madam,” he began. “I understand sensation and intuition as being perceptual ‘functions.’ Sensation would be sense perception of external processes, intuition would be perception of internal processes.” These internal processes, he noted, were partially psychic and partially physical, and they included all aspects of life that the sensorium had failed to register: telepathic phenomena and fantasy activity, the mirage series of the unconscious. “Intuition can see through walls and round the corners and into the deepest obscurities of the human heart,” he wrote. It may not have been properly scientific for him to call intuition a “nobler” function than the others, but reflecting on his dreams, his fantasies, and all they had made possible in his life had appealed to his “feeling side.” “And thus it came that I made that emotional exclamation,” he explained to her. “I am not yet so dried up that I could not wonder any more at the amazing facts of human psychology.”

To say that Katharine Briggs became obsessed with Carl Jung is to understate matters. Ordinary obsession — the passion of a distant admirer — exists in the realm of daydream and wish fulfillment. Katharine’s obsession with Jung was alive, active, purposive. It was the stuff of her waking life and her wandering dreams, and it started innocuously enough. Her next and final piece for the New Republic, which she titled “Up from Barbarism,” celebrated Jung’s romantic preference for intuition with a subtlety that only someone attuned to the details of their correspondence could discern. Excerpted from The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. Copyright © 2018 Merve Emre. Reprinted by permission of Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.