The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

　　風靡全球的 MBTI 性向測驗，是伊莎貝爾母女檔在榮格的心理模型基礎下發展出來的心理分析系統。被廣泛運用在各大企業、醫院與軍隊，連時下流行的社交軟體與網站測驗，都喜歡套用這套人格分析系統，初步將人分成內向與外向、理性與感性，並以如此所得的各象限去分析人的心理與行為。



　　究竟我們為何如此相信 MBTI 性向測驗對我們生活、工作，甚至人際關係的分析？這個測驗最初的構想來自一九二零年代，先是從紐約開始，後來延伸至加州甚至世界各地，倫敦、蘇黎世、開普敦、墨爾本與東京。從小學到修道院與私人訓練機構，紛紛著迷於這套性向分析系統。



　　網羅諸多原始資料與未曾曝光的文件，這本書將用許多有趣的故事及諸多名人的生活小事，遍及榮格，希特勒，甚至是知名小說家楚門卡波堤，透過詼諧但深刻的方式討論性向測驗的定義與論述，輔以歷史事實，讓讀者更能了解複雜理論的背景。



　　作者梅爾（Merve Emre）任教於麥吉爾大學（McGill University），作品散見於紐約人雜誌與哈潑雜誌。（文 / 博客來編譯）

*A New York Times Critics' Best Book of 2018*
*An Economist Best Book of 2018*
*A Spectator Best Book of 2018*
*A Mental Floss Best Book of 2018*

An unprecedented history of the personality test conceived a century ago by a mother and her daughter--fiction writers with no formal training in psychology--and how it insinuated itself into our boardrooms, classrooms, and beyond

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It is used regularly by Fortune 500 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, and the military. Its language of personality types--extraversion and introversion, sensing and intuiting, thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving--has inspired television shows, online dating platforms, and Buzzfeed quizzes. Yet despite the test's widespread adoption, experts in the field of psychometric testing, a ＄2 billion industry, have struggled to validate its results--no less account for its success. How did Myers-Briggs, a homegrown multiple choice questionnaire, infiltrate our workplaces, our relationships, our Internet, our lives?

First conceived in the 1920s by the mother-daughter team of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, a pair of devoted homemakers, novelists, and amateur psychoanalysts, Myers-Briggs was designed to bring the gospel of Carl Jung to the masses. But it would take on a life entirely its own, reaching from the smoke-filled boardrooms of mid-century New York to Berkeley, California, where it was administered to some of the twentieth century's greatest creative minds. It would travel across the world to London, Zurich, Cape Town, Melbourne, and Tokyo, until it could be found just as easily in elementary schools, nunneries, and wellness retreats as in shadowy political consultancies and on social networks.

Drawing from original reporting and never-before-published documents, The Personality Brokers takes a critical look at the personality indicator that became a cultural icon. Along the way it examines nothing less than the definition of the self--our attempts to grasp, categorize, and quantify our personalities. Surprising and absorbing, the book, like the test at its heart, considers the timeless question: What makes you, you?

MERVE EMRE is an associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. 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, Harper’s Magazine, Bookforum, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Baffler, n+1, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is senior humanities editor.