Product Description

Written by the creator of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator inventory, this text distinguishes four categories of personality styles and shows how these qualities determine the way people perceive the world and come to conclusions about what they've seen.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22642 in Books
• Published on: 1995-05-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 248 pages

About the Author
The late Isabel Briggs Myers devoted her life to the observation, study, and measurement of personality. With her mother, Katharine Briggs, she authored the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® personality inventory. Peter B. Myers, Ph.D., continues research work on the development and application of personality type. Former staff director of the National Academy of Science, he is currently extending the use of the MBTI® instrument worldwide.

Customer Reviews

Useful background, but won't help you discover your type
This book gives an overview of the history and theory behind the widely used Myers-Briggs personality type inventory, and briefly but thoroughly summarizes the characteristics of each personality type as well as the "groups" of related types. This is straight from the horse's mouth: Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine Briggs, developed the inventory based on Jung's theory of psychological types, and tested it extensively before it became widely used. The book is generally well organized, easy to read, and clearly written, with occasional touches of humor. But it won't help you identify your type if you don't already know it -- I recommend Kiersey's "Please Understand Me" for that. Still, it's a good resource if you already know your type and want to find out more about it. (Incidentally, you don't have to swallow Jung's psychological theories whole in order to find the Myers-Briggs useful!)

Inspiring stuff for this INFJ!
For me, reading this book unlocked some of my difficult relationships in work - it helped me to identify my type out of 16 possibles (felt a shock of recognition first time of reading)) and to make a good guess at the types of friends and colleagues. This brought the insight that different people have different ways of seeing and behaving and that they are all - shock - of equal value, to be respected and nurtured.
A highly recommended book written with clarity, compassion and understanding and readily accessible whether you know about the MBTI method or not.

Good introduction to the real theory & good examples.
I recommend this book as the first book to read for people who need to understand what type theory is *really* about.

Many of the popular books treat type theory as a flat space of 16 static types. Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers understood and developed Jung's theoretical framework, and the dynamical theory is very clearly explained in Chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 3 outlines the original MBTI empirical research, showing the impact of type on chosen occupations - this is still striking. Part 2 of the book is a systematic examination of the four dimensions of type theory, and includes familiar portraits of the 16 types. Parts III and IV of the book are what you might call 'applications of type theory'. Other reviewers have dismissed these as an eclectic collection of dull chapters: I can only say that I found them an illuminating example of the power of type theory to shed light on many areas of life which appear at first sight to lack unifying features.

If you read this book first, it is then worth looking at David Keirsey's "Please Understand me II" for the encyclopedic number of insights he documents. Hower, with Keirsey you get the empiricist rejection of the Jungian paradigm as somehow "unscientific". (Keirsey's approach seems reminiscent of the view from physics: a computer science or AI approach has considerably fewer conceptual qualms with the kind of internal personality "architecture" presupposed by the Jungian paradigm).

Beyond Keirsey there is "Personality Type : An Owner's Manual" by Lenore Thomson. This is like the post-grad version of "Gifts Differing", and additionally includes a Jungian critique of Keirsey's work and Temperament Theory. After the obligatory low-powered introductory chapters, it's hard going, but essential.