Lifestyle: the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator - better undertsanding the personality

Personality Type or Psychological Type are terms most commonly associated with the model of personality development created by Isabel Briggs Myers (aka Briggs Meyer, Meyer Briggs, Briggs & Myers ) the author of the world's most widely used personality inventory, the MBTI or Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. ® Myers' and her mother, Katharine Briggs, developed their model and inventory around the ideas and theories of psychologist Carl Jung, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud and a leading exponent of Gestalt personality theory. 2 Kinds of Mental Processes In her studies of people and extensive reading of Jung's theories, Myers concluded there were four primary ways people differed from one another. She labelled these differences "preferences" - drawing a similarity to "hand preferences" to illustrate that although we all use both of our hands, most of us have a preference for one over the other and "it" takes the lead in many of the activities in which we use our hands.

The first set of mental preferences relates to how people "Perceive" or take in information, with those who prefer Sensing Perception and those who prefer intuition perception. The second set of mental preferences identifies how people form "Judgments" or make decisions, with those who prefer Thinking Judgment and those whose preference is for Feeling Judgment. There are two other mental preferences that are part of the Myers-Briggs model: Energy Orientation and Outer World Orientation. The first one is the dimension of personality discovered by Carl Jung that became widely adopted by general psychology: Extraversion-Introversion. The second is the dimension of personality that is Myers' unique contribution to Jung's theory, an element she inferred from Jung's work but was not clearly addressed as an essential component of his theory of types. This is the style or orientation one uses in dealing with the external world: Judging or Perceiving.

The permutations of these four preference dichotomies (or tendencies I would add), result in the 16 personality types that form the basis of Myers' model and the MBTI inventory. The problem is that it is not always easy to understand which your determining or leading preferences really are. So what is your type? which “pattern” do you follow? Introverted Intuition with Feeling (infj), Introverted Feeling with Intuition (infp), Extraverted Thinking with Sensing (estj) or something else? Find out more in the MBTI site. And find out more about the 16 types here.