Merve Emre > Quotes

“Not only psychologists, but otherwise intelligent people, quickly become consummate jackasses when they are asked to develop a child’s character,”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“In this sense, type is just the latest iteration of a human maxim as old as the letters carved into the Temple of Apollo at Delphi (γνῶθι σεαυτόν—“ Know thyself”), the confessions of Saint Augustine (“ Return to yourself; truth dwells in the inner man”), the epigrams of Shakespeare (“ To thine own self be true”), and the philosophical meditations of Hegel (“ Self-consciousness is the fount of truth”).”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“It is a lonely business to keep what amounts to a religion entirely to yourself,” she told Jung.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“It perpetuates a very particular culture of capitalism, colonizing people’s psychological livelihoods by encouraging them to work more and work harder by “working at the things that are right for them,” as Isabel liked to say. It promotes many disingenuous and dangerous ideas about race, gender, class, and social perfectibility, ideas that have motivated, and continue to motivate, terrible forms of bias and discrimination.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“For some time, it has been a well-known fact that the type indicator is not scientifically valid; that the theory behind it has no basis in clinical psychology; and that it is the flagship product of a lucrative global corporation, one whose interests sit at the shadowy crossroads of industrial psychology and self-care.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“In retrospect it is easy to see that we have absorbed a distinctly mythic view of the 1950s and 1960s, one in which conformity and creativity do battle across a vast cultural divide.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“the unwavering belief in type’s ability to comprehend who we are—why we work the jobs we work, why we love the people we love, why we behave in the apparently various and contradictory ways we do—a belief that persists despite how shamelessly type classifies individuals and conscripts them into the bureaucratic hierarchies of the workplace, the school, the church, the state, and even their own families.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“The final rule of speaking type was, to my mind, the most important and the most unsettling: you had to conceive of personality as an innate characteristic, something fixed since birth and immutable, like blue eyes or left-handedness. “You have to buy into the idea that type never changes,” Patricia ordered us, and she asked that we chant after her: “Type never changes! Type never changes!” “We will brand this into your brains,” she promised. “The theory behind the indicator supports the fact that you are born with a four-letter preference. If you hear someone say, ‘My type changed,’ they are not correct.” Her insistence on a singular and essential self—a self whose moods and mysteries were crystallized by four simple letters—seemed to me impossibly retrograde amidst the cheerful promises of self-transformation through diet, exercise, travel, therapy, and meditation that I encountered in popular culture every day. Yet it also struck me as an irresistibly attractive fiction. There was a certain narcissistic beauty to the idea, a certain luminance to the promise that, by learning to speak type, we could learn to compress the gestures of our messy, complicated lives into a coherent life story, one capable of expressing both to ourselves and to others not just who we were but who we had been all along.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“It never occurred to her that her interference in the Tuckerman family’s affairs could constitute a risky and profound ethical violation—the kind the American Psychological Association sought to prevent two decades later by indicting the spirit of amateurism that Katharine championed and would continue to embrace as she and Isabel started their work on the type indicator.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“The test offered its subjects more than just the possibility of meeting themselves; it offered them a chance at redeeming themselves, pulling them back from the shame of psychological abnormality, celebrating their differences while also preserving their similarities.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“because she knew she had to find a way to reconcile the woman’s inconsistency with her indicator. She was hopeful, she told Hay, that this act of crossing over meant that the indicator did more than just passively reflect the true self; it provoked the emergence of a better self from within the mind’s cocoon of uncertainty and self-hatred, preserving modes of perception (like sensing) and judgment (like feeling) that society had debased as inefficient, weak, or feminine. “The revelation, the discovery, is a discovery of value in the undervalued, in the part of her psyche which she and others have undervalued,” Isabel concluded. Her interpretation of dreams represented a striking extension of her mother’s racialized imagination, now preserved by the indicator across the generations.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Katharine was a self-diagnosed introvert and proud of it. She was on a “quest for the Self,” she announced to her husband and daughter in 1925, and as such, she believed she was incapable of moving through the world in a conventional manner. “I have never been imitative.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“In writing “Meet Yourself,” Katharine had placed her finger on the nerve center of type’s appeal: the promise that, within each person, there lived a coherent individual who was master of her own life. This was by no means an original sentiment. Western philosophy had, for centuries, set forth a similar argument, from the Socratic dialogues to the writings of the Cynics, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and even the early Christians.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Research into the self was booming in higher education, but the same institutions that sponsored this research were also fighting hard to suppress the typical traits of the creative individual: conviction, complexity, nonconformity.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“For Gatsby, personality was also a necessary fiction, a gimmick that served a very particular purpose: the accumulation of wealth, power, and prestige.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Yet with the end of World War II and the explosion of the labor force, she and Hay both knew that this division no longer dominated conversations about work. What was needed was a test for all the new men and women in the workplace that did not punish them for their perceived vulnerabilities but convinced them and their employees that they had none—only a set of interests and preferences that were better suited to some jobs over others.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“The desperate amateur and the dogmatic statistician—there was no real resolution to the impasse they had reached.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Yet the reality of the test was that, while it was one of the most-talked-about personality inventories on the market, the theory behind it a flashy convergence of nineteenth-century literature and psychology, it was not, strictly speaking, valid in any sense of the word.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Concerned for her daughter, Una forbade Katharine from seeing her and took Mary to a psychiatrist—an “extravert Freudian who had a deadly hatred for me,” Katharine complained to Jung. She believed that she and Jung were fighting Una and Freud for Mary’s soul, a fight in which she was on the side of the righteous—the side of her god and other introverts—and Una, her mind scandalized by Freud’s suggestions of sexual impropriety and deviance, was on the side of evil.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“They counted in their ranks chemists, economists, historians, physicists, political scientists, and zoologists, but no minorities or women. “We did not take any Oriental students, of whom there were several, feeling that since they came from a different type of background, they would require special consideration,” MacKinnon explained in his research briefing. As for women, he could admit only that “the problem of the successful woman in what remain largely male professions has not been much discussed by us”—an “unconscious omission,” he claimed, on the part of his staff. Black-and-white photographs of the first test subjects confirm that life inside 2240 did not look all that dissimilar from life inside the fraternity house it had once been. Here was a group of elite white men handpicked to “participate in games and other competitions and collaborations, engage in social conversations, and submit to organized interviews.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Here is one thing about which there can be no doubt. She would have been heartened by the testimonials of the thousands of people who, upon discovering type, claimed that it had helped them clarify not just who they were but who they wanted to be, the people who seemed untouched by irony even today.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Scientific or not, the indicator had always managed to spark a sudden and ecstatic perception of self-knowledge in its subjects, no matter their age, sex, education, occupation, or political leanings, no matter their initial skepticism toward its operations.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“It all ended quite badly for Gatsby, of course—his curated personality was, ultimately, a dangerous, deadly gimmick. But Fitzgerald’s story about personality’s intangible, imaginative dimensions showed how one could, over time, assemble and disassemble the self until it was virtually indistinguishable from something inherent, something eternal, something true.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“The concept of the individual was an “ideological veil,” Adorno insisted—a romantic capitalist fiction in a society committed to categorizing and dividing people while pretending to safeguard their souls. Yet Adorno was eager to acknowledge that not all typologies served as devices for dividing the world into “sheep and buck.” Some of them had “hit upon something,” he speculated—a hazy kind of truth about the self. Not all forms of assessment proceeded by pathologizing personality, by dividing human beings into those who were “normal” and those who were not, as the Humm-Wadsworth did. Some typological systems offered individuals more than just passive membership in a predetermined psychological class. They armed the populace with a clarifying language of self-awareness, a language capable of fighting widespread political and social manipulation where it began—in the minds of the people. Within such ideal typological systems, the very idea of having a self emerged as a weapon of mass resistance, undoing the impulse to type—and thus to control—from within.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“The consequence was that the indicator could no longer hide its classifying impulses behind the ideological veil of individualism. By the new millennium, CAPT’s 1990 marketing campaign—“ You are not one of sixteen. You are one in a million”—could not be uttered without skepticism, maybe even an eye roll, at the naïveté of the sentiment.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Although they were not the only figures in the history of personality psychology to pose these questions, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, were among the first to perceive how hungry the masses were for simple, self-affirming answers to the problem of self-knowledge. As proud wives, mothers, and homemakers with no formal training in psychology or psychiatry, they believed they could craft a language of the self that was free from judgment and malice; free from the coldness and impassivity that, in their minds, characterized the attitudes of professional clinicians. Their first subjects were the people they loved the most, their husbands and their children; their first workplaces were their homes.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“The Great Gatsby afforded its readers a remarkably vivid example of putting one’s personality to work, trading “those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“John Ross, a psychometrician visiting ETS from the University of Western Australia, who had no interest in either Jung’s theories or their applications, only in their truthfulness. “I think it is true to say that Mrs. Myers has been more interested in proving that her theory is correct and in achieving ever greater refinement on the use of the Indicator than in stopping to evaluate it,” he informed Chauncey in November 1959. Despite professing his impatience with theoretical argument, Ross expressed serious doubts about Isabel’s misappropriation of Jungian thought: her inaccurate definitions of “introversion” and “extraversion,” her insistence that type never changed.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Although the world has come a long way since Katharine opened her cosmic laboratory of baby training, the link the language of type helped forge between self-discovery and self-creation stays intact. Self-awareness remains a precious psychological offering no matter the end, and the painless knowledge peddled by the indicator can seem more appealing than other, more chaotic processes of self-excavation, ones that do not fit neatly into a 4 × 4 type chart or a four-letter acronym.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“What Isabel and her mother had done was to take a complex philosophical explanation for human subjectivity and flatten it into unrecognizable caricatures of psychological theory: the self dwindled into a four-letter acronym, the world compressed into a 4 × 4 type table.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing