Merve Emre - What’s Your Type?: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

Merve Emre is an associate professor of English at the University of Oxford and fellow of Worcester College. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the New Yorker, Harpers Magazine, Bookforum, The Nation, the New Republic, Boston Review, The Baffler,n+1,The Walrus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is senior humanities editor.

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I never would have written this book without the encouragement and guidance of Alia Hanna Habib and Anna Dubenkomy first and greatest thanks go to them. I am grateful beyond measure to Yaniv Soha, Anne Collins, Sarah Porter, and Tom Killingbeck for their keen editorial input and to Daniel Novack and Natalie Cereseto for their valuable legal advice and good humor. I am thankful to everyone at Doubleday U.S., Random House Canada, and HarperCollins U.K. for all the hard work they did to transform my words into an object out in the world.

I owe so much to my earliest readers and friends: Sarah Chihaya, Michelle Cho, Ming-Qi Chu, Gabriella Coleman, Maggie Doherty, Eve Fine, Gloria Fisk, Shanon Fitzpatrick, Len Gutkin, Amy Hungerford, Evan Kindley, Sean McCann, Marcel Przymusinski, Sarah Rose, Poulami Roychowdhury, Rachel Greenwald Smith, Richard Jean So, and Rachel Watson. Kasia van Schaik read my manuscript several times, always with an exacting and generous eye. Thank you for making my work better, and thank you too for making the process of revision so enjoyable.

Once again, my greatest debt is to Christian Nakarado, whose list of personae might include: husband, father, reader, editor, weekend babysitter, and neat man who has to contend with a messy woman. Aydin Berk Nakarado and Altan Emre Nakarado inspired my writing and thinking in ways I had not thought possible. Their grubby little fingerprints are all over this book. Thank you to Gulus Emre, Melis Emre, and Sukru Emre, whose presence, even at a distance, makes me happy and keeps me motivated.

If, as Katharine and Isabel believed, every child is an experiment from the moment she is born, then that childs mother deserves most of the credit for the experiments outcome. This book is dedicated to my mother Umit Emre: my inspiration, my model, my friend. By dumb luck, I was fortunate enough to grow up in her cosmic laboratory.

Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America

K atharine Elizabeth Cook, co-creator of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, never had much patience for scientific thought, though she had grown up in the heart of scientific America. She was born on January 3, 1875, in East Lansing, Michigan, on prime midwestern farmland that was home to Michigan Agricultural College, one of the first land grant was a matter for the individual soul, not the species.

, she remembered, my capacity for loyalty and devotion to a goal was pronounced, so that my parents felt proud of what they called my stick-to-itiveness, without in the least understanding the psychology of it.

That stick-to-itiveness, so may lack the data that the soul possesses, she worried to her mother.

To ease her conscience, she sought advice from her elders, both at school and at church. Dissatisfied, she decided to search for an answer through prayer. communing with her mothers god. The material world was especially ill-equipped to deal with what both Katharine and her mother identified as the greatest problem of their time, a problem that transcended her fathers preoccupation with evolution, sexual reproduction, and even the survival of the human speciesthe personal, passionate, subjective, and religious problem of personal salvation.

a human being and not an animala brute, as she deemed the less civilized orders of men. We teach a lie when we teach that all men are equal, she wrote. The lower orders of men are far closer to the higher animals than to the higher orders of men, and we ought to recognize that fact.

Although her tone brooked no argument, for some time she continued to wonder at her inability to love life, her status as a spectator of the present. The Cooks family doctor prescribed all sorts of small diversions to help her connect with reality: a game of tennis with Bert when he came back home for a visit, an outdoor concert with her parents on a warm summer night, a birthday party with the neighborhood children. But she dismissed his suggestions as a waste of time and energy. She knew that she had to direct herself even deeper inward, not outward, if she were to save her soul in this modern world, a world that seemed to have no use for the soul at all. So she chose instead to dwell in her fantasies and her daydreams, detached from the ebb and flow of life around her, frequently alone.

Then she met Lyman Briggs, and they began to dwell in her dreams together.

....

Lyman Briggs was a farm boy from Assyria, Michigan, whose ancestors had arrived in America on the Fortune, the first ship to follow the Mayflower to Plymouth Rock. The routines of his childhood would have been familiar to any midwestern pioneer. Every day he and his brother would rise before dawn and feed the chickens and pigs, gather eggs, drive the cows to pasture, and stock the kitchen wood box. When they were done with their household chores, they would walk several miles to the district schoolhouse their grandfather Briggs had builtrumor had it with his own handsand then to the church he had founded for afternoon prayers. Yet unlike Katharine, who preferred the church pew to the laboratory bench, Lyman felt most at home among the physical materials of the world, treasuring the instruments men had designed to understand the inner and outer workings of nature. At the age of fifteen, Lyman arrived at Michigan Agricultural College. From the moment he saw the great glass cases in the physics laboratory filled with their marvelous apparatusesthe clouded beakers, the silvered coilshe knew he wanted to be a scientist.

At school, he was smart and well-liked and so delicately handsome that capital, she was just eighteen years old.

Their first child, Isabel McKelvey Briggs, was born in 1897 and greeted with paroxysms of love. Their second, Albert Briggs, named after Katharines father, was born in 1899. When Isabel was two and Albert two months, Katharine started a diary to document the childrens daily activities. She was awestruck by her daughter, who, although only a toddler curious and inventive personality. She is living in the midst of marvels which make of life a volume of mystery tales, wrote Katharine as she watched her daughter play with her dolls, boiling imaginary eggs for them in an imaginary saucepan that she had filled with imaginary water. When the dolls had finished eating, she gave the eggs she had saved to her little brother.