291 - Myers-Briggs and Other Modern Astrologies

Myers-Briggs and Other Modern Astrologies
By Thomas G. Long

The story reads like a fairy tale.

Isabel Briggs was a bright, gentle, and reflective child, educated in her early years at home by her two remarkably gifted parents, Charles, an innovative scientist and a pioneer in the fields of aviation and atomic energy, and Katherine, a quiet observer of human behavior and an eager, self-taught student of Jungian psychology.1 An honors graduate of Swarthmore College, Isabel married Clarence Myers, spending the early years of their marriage as a homemaker, a mother, and a mystery novelist of some renown.

World War II, however, transformed Isabel's life, the atrocities of that war motivating her to a deepened concern for human reconciliation. If people could better understand themselves and others, she believed, destructive human conflict could be avoided or, at least, moderated. So, building upon her mother's investigations into personality typology, Isabel worked tirelessly to turn Katherine Briggs' theories into practice. Her goal was to create an easily administered, uncomplicated questionnaire by which ordinary people could quickly determine their psychological personality type. Her idea was that once a person recognized his or her own personality tendencies, and became aware of the companion truth that not everyone possesses those same tendencies, the path would be cleared for greater self-awareness and a deeper tolerance of the innate differences among people.

The result of Isabel's labors was the now well-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Based upon an elaboration of Jung's comprehensive theory of personality, which appeared in the 1920s, the MBTI seeks to disclose a person's preferences among four pairs of personality variables: two basic attitudes (extraversion or introversion), two kinds of perception (sensing or intuiting), two manners of seeking rational order (thinking or feeling), and two varieties of orientation toward the outer world (perceptive or judging). Choices among these

¹ The information about Isabel Myers, her family, and the development of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is drawn in part from John Black's biographical "Publisher's Foreword" in Isabel Briggs Myers and Peter B. Myers, Gifts Differing (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc., 1980), pp. ix-xii.

292 - Myers-Briggs and Other Modern Astrologies

four pairs mathematically produce sixteen possible combinations, or personality "types," each expressed in shorthand by a four-letter code. Isabel Myers, for example, reported that her own personality type was INFP (introverted-intuitive-feeling-perceiving), while her mother, Katherine, was INFJ (introverted-intuitive-feeling-judging).

In the early days, it was not easy to convince others of the value of the MBTI After all, Isabel had no recognized credentials as a psychologist. Moreover, most established psychologists were skeptical of measuring something as ephemeral as a human personality, and even among those professionals who were open to the possibility, there was little regard for typological theory. Everywhere she turned, Isabel encountered disinterest and even hostility.

Undeterred, she began by testing her own teenaged children and their friends. Then she cornered high school principals and a medical school dean, an acquaintance of her father, prevailing upon them to allow her to administer the MBTI to their students. Gradually, and through sheer persistence, Isabel gained the attention and, finally, the respect of those interested in psychometrics. A breakthrough came in the 1960s when the Educational Testing Service began to distribute the MBTI and serious research was performed on it at several universities.

Today, the MBTI enjoys tremendous use and success. Among the non-psychiatric population, no other instrument of personality assessment is more widely used. It is employed as a tool by vocational and marriage counselors and as a resource for such purposes as educational placement, personal growth retreats, and the matching of college roommates.

Moreover, and most important for our discussion, the MBTI and its sixteen personality types have taken root in the vocabulary of the church. Many clergy have, in one setting or another, taken the MBTI (they tend to cluster, it is reported, in several of the personality types), and a cottage industry of religious publishers and workshop leaders is humming, generating materials and programs relating the MBTI to clerical leadership styles, church staffing needs, and spiritual development in general. Just before her death in her eighties, Isabel Myers borrowed a phrase from Paul's Epistle to the Romans for the title of her last work, Gifts Differing, a book describing the MBTI and breathing the confident hope that its continued use would help to alleviate many of the problems that beset humanity.

The response to Isabel Myers and to the MBTI, then, has moved from cool distance to warm acceptance. Hundreds of thousands of people can now report their MBTI personality type, and are often eager to do so. All through the church, in workshops and Bible studies and prayer retreats, the categories of the MBTI are reverently intoned. The story of the MBTI's rise to prominence, especially its avid use in the life of the church, reads like a fairy tale.

Perhaps the time has come for the fairy tale to end.

293 - Myers-Briggs and Other Modern Astrologies

In the first place, the validity of the MBTI is by no means assured. Most specialists in personality testing concur that the MBTI measures something about a person's psychological tendencies, but they are not at all agreed on just what that something might be or what importance should be attached to it. Professional assessments of the reliability of the MBTI range from heartfelt praise to the more sobering statement in Lawrence Pervin's Handbook of Personality Theory and Research that "the extension of Jung's theory .... as operationalized by the MBTI, has failed to generate the requisite empirical support."² The most trustworthy aspect of the MBTI appears to involve the extravert-introvert scale, and the gravest doubts are raised about the nuanced personality descriptions derived from the interactions among the four scales-precisely that aspect of the MBTI that church folk tend to find so revealing and useful.

Putting aside questions about its reliability, the MBTI itself is not the real issue. Many professionals who employ the inventory are actually quite modest about its results, refreshingly detached from the creaky Jungian steam engine that runs it, and see the MBTI mainly as a conversation starter, only one among several tools for self-discovery. The main problem has to do with the uncritical, theologically naive, rigid, and overly confident manner in which Myers-Briggs categories are often employed in various church settings. Church people, particularly the clergy, are taking MBTI results as the gospel truth and blithely using them to make employment decisions, to establish leadership styles and regulate staff relationships, and to advise people about everything from marriage roles to prayer techniques. MBTI-fueled conversation at some clergy conferences ranges from the quasiastrological ("Hi, I'm an ENFP. How about you?") and the self-indulgent ("Count me out; that's not the way we 'SFs' like to process") to the superficially strategic ("The pews are full of 'SJ traditionalists,' and the most effective way to preach to them is …") and on to the downright condescending ("What a typical 'J' thing to do").

Were it not presented so solemnly, some of the religious literature growing out of the MBTI movement would be hilarious. Several "experts" in the theological use of the MBTI advise matching prayer styles to personality type (SJs are steered toward "Ignatian" prayer, NTs to "Thomistic" prayer, NFs to "Augustinian" prayer, and so on), and others, crashing against the wall of historical constraint, conjecture about, of all things, the Myers-Briggs personality tendencies of the authors of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. At least one book even hints at Jesus' Myers-Briggs type-perfectly balanced, of course. (Jung, inconveniently, viewed such impartial personalities as the product of a "primitive mentality.")

Why is it that so many in the Christian church, with its long and rich

² Lawrence A. Pervin, editor, Handbook of Personality Theory and Research (New York:Guilford Press, 1990), p. 429.

294 - Myers-Briggs and Other Modern Astrologies

history of understanding persons in the most profound way possible -as living souls and as creatures made in the image of God¾ should fall into the trap of allowing for a moment those theologically enduring and wondrously mysterious understandings to be displaced by something as superficial as a grid of sixteen suspiciously artificial personality types woven out of a questionable and all-too-fashionable theory of human temperament?

Part of the answer lies no doubt in the way that the acids of modern life have eaten away confidence and clarity about personal identity leaving many people desperately hungry to be known, by themselves and by others. Popular magazines feed this hunger with an endless round of instant inventories alleged to disclose one's true and hidden identity ("Are you too obsessed with sex? Take our test on page 18 ... "). Uncertain of who we are, we are all too ready to have an outside expert tell us. In this regard, the MBTI is well-matched to our age. A few minutes spent answering a set of relatively simple questions and there you are, your personality unfolded and displayed in seemingly intimate and intricate detail.

Add to this Isabel Myers' tendency to describe each personality type in unfailingly optimistic terms and the possibilities for self-flattery abound. For example, ESFPs are, she tells us, "outgoing, easygoing, accepting, friendly, enjoy everything and make things more fun for others... " while ISTJs are "practical, orderly, matter-of-fact, logical, realistic, and dependable."³ Nowhere do we encounter the harder truth about ourselves and others, namely the possibility that our personalities include not-so-admirable traits like greed, envy, selfishness, or a propensity toward violence. Myers was aware, of course, that personality formation can go awry, that "bad type development" does happen, but even here she tended to speak in the meekest of terms, admitting that certain personality types may "fail to finish anything," "neglect their feeling values, become too sensitive and vulnerable," or "burden themselves with a sense of inadequacy."

In short, the MBTI profiles read like horoscopes from Camelot. Taken too seriously, they can be perilously close to fortune cookies for the human potential movement. In contrast, running through the Christian theological tradition is a view of humanity that is far more complex, at once far more sober about human failings, far more truly hopeful about the human prospect, and far more infused with mystery, featuring a landscape of exhilarating peaks of communion with the holy and also valleys of tragic denial of our humanity. The gospel does not, of course, contain a psychology of human development. Such knowledge must be sought elsewhere, and welcomed when it is found. But any psychological portrait of the human condition must be placed into critical interaction with what we do know about human life from the gospel. Placed alongside the robust doctrines of human sinfulness

³ Isabel Briggs-Myers and Mary H. McCaulley, Manual: A Guide to the Development and Use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1985), p. 20.

295 - Myers-Briggs and Other Modern Astrologies

and of divine grace and human blessing, the view of personality operating in the MBTI seems to spend much of the time floating lazily in the shallow end of the pool.

The sixteen basic personality types encompassed by the MBTI are enough to offer the illusion of complexity, comprehensiveness, and individuality, but not so many as to deprive one of the comfort of companionship. The MBTI excites you with the knowledge that you are special and not like everybody else -there are, after all, fifteen other personality types -but soothes you by telling you that you are not truly eccentric either, since many others share your type. To reveal one's MBTI personality type to another carries much of the feeling of frank, searching self-disclosure, with little of the risk. Like many other explanatory schemes that have become popular in pastoral circles-faith development, the stages of dying, and the categories of congregational growth, to name some others-the MBTI grid of personality types is an attempt to make manageable what is essentially unpredictable, to force some semblance of order onto a process that is inescapably wild and full of wondrous surprises.

Indeed, the whole idea of personality types is based upon a faintly nineteenth-century notion that a human personality is a discrete and enduring entity, a hard stone in the river bed of culture, perdurable in the streams of circumstance. This makes MBTI-styled talk vaguely deterministic: "This is my personality; it's just the way I am, probably always will be." It is far more fruitful to think of a "personality" in relational terms, as the way one tends to behave with certain other people and under certain conditions. Some aspects of a personality persist from setting to setting, but a relational view opens up the possibility of true complexity, unexpected change, repentance, even conversion. An instrument like the MBTI may describe the lattice work of a person's personality, but far more interesting is the ivy that winds unpredictably through it.

The main, and perhaps only, value of the MBTI is to underscore the rather obvious truth that people are not all alike, but not all that different either. Human personalities, we are told, come in sixteen brands, quantifiable and stacked on the shelf. Thus, whatever use it may wish to make of instruments like the MBTI, the Christian church needs to make some protest as well, to refuse to accept that people can be known in any serious way through a pencil and paper questionnaire dashed off in a few moments, to insist upon knowing people in the only way they can genuinely be known-in costly and messy relationships that endure-never forgetting that these two-legged reflections of the imago Dei are far more fascinating, far more dangerous, far more beautiful, far more unpredictable, and far more richly graced that any psychometrician ever dreamed.