It takes a while to realize that Emre has gotten you hooked under arguably false pretenses, but what she finally pulls off is so inventive and beguiling you can hardly begrudge her for it ... The Personality Brokers is history that reads like biography that reads like a novel — a fluid narrative that defies expectations and plays against type ... The Personality Brokers contains a judicious amount of historical context ... it’s Katharine and Isabel who are at the core of this story, and Emre depicts these two women — long dead and largely unknown — with the acuity they deserve. Isabel, in particular, is drawn with precise, confident strokes.
The pleasure of Emre’s book...is not vague grandiosity but specificity. Whatever her reservations about Katharine [Briggs] and Isabel [Myers]’s work, her commitment to her subjects is total—she renders personality in all its detail and contradiction. Her heroines are readers and writers at heart, inveterate observers and storytellers, and Emre, a literary scholar, portrays them in this spirit. Both obsessive and dauntlessly able, they emerge as true, irreducible weirdos ... The Personality Brokers presents a damningly thorough critique of the MBTI: From its lack of scientific merit to its role as a tool of Cold War–era conformity, personality testing looks misguided at best and potentially sinister at worst. Emre echoes Theodor Adorno, who aligned the exercises of personality typing and people-sorting with fascism. And yet her book’s slyest argument against MBTI—conveyed forcefully, if only implicitly—might be its portrait of Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs themselves. Emre confronts the reader with an undeniable gulf between the normalcy they profess and the energetic, idiosyncratic intensity they display. The banalities of type falter beside their combined force of personality.
...in this riveting, far-reaching book she brings the skills of a detective, cultural critic, historian, scientist and biographer to bear on the MBTI and the two women who invented and promoted it ... when Ms. Emre describes her book as being 'for the skeptics, the true believers, and everyone in between,' she is absolutely right.
... an archivally rich mix of history, biography, and a bit of reporting ... What distinguishes Emre’s book is its close, sympathetic study of the test’s creators and their aspirations. They clearly had goals aside from making money, and they never did make much; the boom happened after Isabel’s death in 1980.
Emre’s book expands on other twentieth-century psychology and personality theories, especially those focused on what might be described as the psychology of middle class white males. This description makes clear some of the limits of MBTI.
The human race has been seeking personal validation since the early Greeks ('know thyself'); this eye-opening account gives readers insight into how one evaluation method morphed into a neat, satisfying packaging system for our complicated psyches.
In this fascinating survey of the popular Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) and its passionate originators Katharine Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, Merve Emre delves deeply into these women’s personalities ... Relying on meticulous research, Emre reveals the vulnerable mindset of young housewife Briggs when she happened upon Carl Jung’s psychological theories in the 1920s ... Emre engagingly follows all of these paths to illustrate the deep and broad impact one test has had on people the world over.
...[a] truly absorbing, wide-ranging book ... As Emre shows, the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator, like other tests of aptitude, was shot through with bias ... The book is filled with startling material including the influence on Katharine and Isabel of The Great Gatsby (1925) with its portrait of a methodically-assembled personality ... The Personality Brokers is a rich, fair-minded book of enormous scope and deftly presented detail. It encompasses biography as well as social, cultural, and business history, and shows magnificently what a pivotal decade the 1920s were in America.
What’s refreshing and probably most interesting about The Personality Brokers... is what we get by largely suspending judgment about the test’s origins and aims, by asking how and why it’s taken hold in American culture in the way that it has ... In reading a good book, I’ll often find a personality trait I recognize, an illuminating situation, or an idea about the world that helps me understand myself or someone else in a new way. In each of dozens of books I’ve read, I learned more about myself than I did when I took the MBTI. The Personality Brokers was one of those books.
Emre traces the intersection of the Briggs-Myers inventory with widespread interest in personality that involved prominent psychologists, sociologists, businessmen, college admissions officers, and researchers eager to find tools for measuring character and capability. A discerning history of the quest for self-knowledge.
Emre’s fine study balances some sharp criticisms, such as from social theorist Theodor Adorno, with her own candid testimonial to the MBTI’s effectiveness; in the process she restores Briggs and Myers to their rightful place in the annals of popular psychology.
