Psychological Type and the MyersBriggs Type Indicator essays

Psychological Type and the MyersBriggs Type Indicator essays Running Head: MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE INDICATOR Psychological Type and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Northwestern State University of Louisiana Psychological Type and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator One of the most enduring typological classifications was devised by Jung and has served as the foundation for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Anastasi, 1997). The Myers-Briggs (MBTI) designates one's personality type, based upon a classification scheme, which consists of four basic scales and two types within each scale. Thus, there are sixteen possible Myers-Briggs personality types. The scheme is based upon the intuitions of Carl Jung, whose gifted insight revealed that all people at all times are best understood in terms of extroversion/introversion, sensation/intuition, and objective/subjective. The latter category has since been subdivided into two classes by revisionists: feeling/thinking, and perceiving/judging. Classifying people did not originate with Jung. In the middle of the fifth century B.C.E., Hippocrates explained the four temperaments in terms of dominant humors in the body: melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, or choleric. The melancholic, he claimed, was dominated by yellow bile in the kidneys, the sanguine by humors in the blood, the phlegmatic by phlegm, and the choleric by the black bile of the liver. Hippocrates was simply adding to the ancient Greek insight that all things reduce to earth, air, water and fire. Each of the four elements had its dualities: hot/cold and dry/moist. A persons physical, psychological, and moral qualities could easily be understood by his temperament, his dominant humors, the four basic elements, or whether he was hot and wet or cold and dry. The ancient personality type indicator worked for over one thousand years. Today, most of us have abandoned Hippocrates' personality scheme because we do not find it to have any meaningful use. In the early 1940s, Isabel Briggs My...