Pulled right out of Carl Jung’s anamnesis, a book titled “Psychological Types” was published in 1921, setting forth a new modern form of identity. Years after the book’s publication, during the tumult of World War II, two women found solace in Jung’s ideas; their names were Katherine and Isabel Meyers. They were a mother-daughter team who set out to add rigor to the loose associations in Jung’s navel-gazing work on psychological type. Some attack these women for being unqualified. This criticism is unfair because making a personality typing system requires no qualification, in my estimation, because personality types aren’t scientifically valid in the first place. Jung may have been a very educated man, however, many of his theories aren’t scientific (at least not in the modern sense). What you have as a result are very eloquent and convincing opinions from his perspective. From Jung’s conclusions came the Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator (often abbreviated as MBTI). Jung’s findings, the very foundations upon which MBTI is standing, are based on outdated pseudoscientific information from one very influential Swiss.
What is MBTI?
If you’re still reading and you don’t yet know about the most popular and widely known personality test in the world, I will briefly explain it. There are a plethora of copycats floating around the internet that don’t represent the official MBTI. Still, most of them operate under four dichotomies, although how they come to their conclusions could vary wildly.
Extraversion Versus Introversion:
The first dichotomy is probably the most easily recognizable, that is, extroversion and introversion. This dichotomy attempts to classify what your preferred method of perceiving the world is. Do you see the world as a place or thing you interact with, or do you see the world as a place or thing to perceive? Or more simply put, do you interact with the outside world or are you in your head most of the time? If you answered the former, you are an extrovert, and you are assigned an E. If you answered for the latter, you are an introvert, and your personality type would have an I.
Intuition Versus Sensation:
This dichotomy, like the previous one, deals with how you address the world. If you prefer intuition, you will prefer to use mental frameworks or imagination to deal with the world. If you favor sensation, you will want to use the environment to make conclusions about the world. The explanation I gave is incredibly abstract and general, and it will require an example. Let’s say you have a sensor and an intuitive person, and they are walking through a park. The intuitive tells the sensor that they will probably see a deer on their walk. The sensor agrees but asks why the intuitive thinks this, and the intuitive tells him because it looks like a place a deer would be. The sensor tells the intuitive that they agree with them but only because they noticed deer droppings as they walked from the parking lot. Neither person was wrong in this situation. The intuitive person used their idea of where a deer would be and concluded based on that. The sensor used the sensory detail they gathered from the world itself. If you are a sensor, you will have an S in your type, and if you are intuitive, you will have an N.
Thinking Versus Feeling:
This dichotomy is an individual’s preference for people or things and how that affects their perception of events. If you make decisions based on efficiency or logic, you are a thinker and your type will have a T. If you prioritize the feelings and sentiments of yourself and/or others over efficiency and logic, you are likely a feeler, and you will have an F in your type.
Judging Versus Perceiving:
This dichotomy is probably the most straightforward of the four. If a person is proactive and seeks to get things done to move onto the next task, this person is likely a judger and will have a J in their type. If this person likes to keep plans open and is reluctant to finish things, this person is likely a perceiver and will have a P in their type.
Let’s say that a person scored as an introvert, an intuitive, a thinker, and a judger; that would make him classified as an INTJ.
Once you have figured out your type, what should you do now?
Many people learn about their personality types, and they will want to tell everyone about their type. They may wish to type everyone they know. There are people online that build their identities around this personality type.
What is the harm in that?
I have seen many criticisms of MBTI and personality tests in general. There are many typical avenues that critics will use to attack MBTI. One common objection is to attack the credibility of the women who created the test. They say that they are unqualified and they have no business making a test to give out to people. I don’t think that Jung’s ‘findings’ would qualify as reputable in any psychological journal today by our modern standards either so the question of qualification, I believe, is an unfair one. A second common criticism is that the tests’ results are not reproducible, and therefore they are invalid. The Big Five Personality Test has very consistent results and is scientific, so surely it must be valid. Right?
There is no such thing as a type.
There is a fundamental problem with the idea of a personality type that seems to be missed by most critics. Yes, personality types are, for the most part, personal observations of people, fitting everyone into a stereotypical category all under the guise of pseudoscientific language. But even if we talk about a test or a typing system that is reproducible like the Big Five, we should disregard the results. MBTI was not originally intended to be used for hiring purposes, and from what I understand, they still do not allow it. Despite this, other psychometric tests have been used and are still used to put people in categories for the purposes of knowing how to manage workers better. People not organizations usually use the MBTI to classify themselves.
Ending Psychological Types
I want to conclude this by calling for people to put the idea of personality to death. First, I ask to do away with the nonsensical idea of personality. I call for you to offer your personality up to yourself like an effigy offered for ritual destruction. The notion of a personality type constrains a person into typical pathways and thought patterns. The fear I have is that people don’t find MBTI to know themselves; instead, they find MBTI to solidify themselves into a concrete predictable idea of self that restricts them from changing in any way that could potentially make them uncomfortable.
MBTI forces people to filter their self-perceptions into a false dichotomy. Many of these elements are purely situational. Some extremely outgoing people will consider themselves introverts because they like to have time alone. One other glaring problem is the dichotomy between thinking and feeling. There is no relationship outside of this forced dichotomy between emotionality and logical thinking. Even if someone would consider themselves a rational person, they may base all of their decisions on emotion or sentiment, like a love for their family. A person like this would create an individual doing perfectly logical actions for the most subjective and emotional reasons.
The purpose is not to poke holes in the theory itself because I think even if it was scientifically valid, we should rebel against it. The point is to begin to think of a self without a label. I have typed myself, again and again, using all sorts of methodologies. I am aware of many different personality systems. I chose to talk about MBTI because it is the most popular, and as it was for me, I’m confident it is for others, a gateway into a thought of self that I do not think is healthy.
I’m writing this as a sort of break-up letter to MBTI. I had spent years on message boards and taking online tests for fun. It was an escape for me, as I expect it is for many others like me going through periods in their life where they aren’t sure where to go or who they are. My experience has shown me that the tests and the personality types will not help you understand yourself any more than you are willing to reveal to yourself.
Personality is paradoxical, there are many definitions of personality, but none are definitive. A personality type can reveal some aspect of yourself. But my point is that one shouldn't identify with a personality type. Instead, an individual’s goal is not to attach themselves to an identity separate from themselves like an MBTI type, but to individuate. What does becoming who you are mean? It implies a person you authentically are, but you have to work to be this person. But aren’t you, you? How does one become themselves? A subject that Carl Jung, had written a lot about, was creating an authentic identity. Jung was not interested in the MBTI when he learned of it, and understandably so. Jung was concerned with a process he referred to as individuation, whereby a person becomes an actual unique version of themselves or, as Leon Schlamm writing in the Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion, writes,
“The aim of individuation, equated with the extension of consciousness and the development of personality, is to divest the self of its false wrappings of the persona, the mask the personality uses to confront the world.”
The MBTI, among many other things in one’s life, are nothing but personas, a mask you wear to navigate life socially. One should not look at the persona and think of it as a reflection, instead remove the persona and begin to move freely as yourself to know yourself.
Conclusion:
Please don’t misunderstand understand me. I know personality types can be fun. However, it has a dangerous message. The message of MBTI is that you are just like one of the 16 personality (Stereo)types, and your individual nuances are statistically insignificant. MBTI can help you understand who you are in a social sense; it can help you know your persona’s contours. It can help you understand other’s behavior. But this is only a surface-level glance at a person. A persona, a mask, is used to cover the imperfections and blemishes that a person will try to hide from the public. For someone to identify with a persona, like an MBTI type, would be willfully identifying with something that is not yourself but just a mask. The process places your identity outside of yourself and doesn’t allow an accurate view of who you are.
