The Lenore Thomson Exegesis Wiki
Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers were a mother and daughter who invented a system of classifying personalities. In the 1920s, they had invented a classification of personality types as an aid to writing fiction. When Carl Jung's book Psychological Types came out, they thought that Carl Jung had hit on essentially the same set of classifications, but more systematically laid out. They replaced their categories with Jung's: "Executives" became "Extraverted Thinking Types" and so on.
Briggs and Myers thought that Jung's system could have practical uses. If people knew their type, perhaps they could make better career choices, for example. If people knew other people's types, perhaps they could appreciate those people for what they are and not judge them for being different or try to "correct" them.
Isabel Myers worked most of the rest of her life on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a personality test that she hoped would make it possible to determine people's personality types empirically. She modified Jung's concepts and terminology to reflect both a dominant function and an auxiliary function (see below). She and Mary McCaulley founded the Center for Applications of Psychological Type (CAPT) "to make C. G. Jung's theory of psychological types understandable and useful in people's lives."
Briggs, Myers, and CAPT administered the MBTI to tens of thousands of people in a great variety of occupations in order to find patterns of what types fit best in what kinds of places and jobs. Myers invented the concept of the "self-selection ratio" (SSR): the ratio of the number of people of a given type in some activity to the number of people of the same type in the general population.
A very easy-to-read but thorough summary of her results is her book Gifts Differing.
The result of taking the MBTI is a four-letter code, which stands for your top two preferred function attitudes. The four-letter codes map to function attitudes as follows. Lenore Thomson uses the same system of four-letter codes. To learn more about the terminology, or at least our guesses about it, just click the links.
| • | The first letter is either E or I. It stands for whether your dominant function is Extraverted or Introverted. |
| • | The second letter is either S or N. It stands for whether your preferred function attitude for perception--that is, your preferred "irrational function"--is Intuition (N) or Sensation (S). |
| • | The third letter is either T or F. It stands for whether your preferred function attitude for making judgements--that is, your preferred "rational function"--is Thinking or Feeling. |
| • | The fourth letter is either J or P. This is the only one that's a bit tricky. It stands for whether your preferred extraverted function is your preferred judging function or your preferred perceiving function. |
For example, the letters ENFP mean: dominant function: Extraverted Intuition, auxiliary function: Introverted Feeling.
That fourth letter bears some explanation. Whereas Carl Jung had written of a dominant function, an auxiliary function, a tertiary function, and an inferior function, Briggs and Myers hypothesized that a person's auxiliary function would tend to have the opposite "attitude" from their dominant function. If the person's dominant function was extraverted, their auxiliary function would be introverted; if the person's dominant function was introverted, their auxiliary function would be extraverted.
Myers came up with the concept of the General and the Aide. The General is the main part of your personality, your strongest element. The Aide is a different, complementary strength, not quite in the same league as the General, but providing a complementary perspective and set of capabilities. The General is your dominant function, and the Aide is your auxiliary function. Typically the General works on whatever you consider most important; the General dispatches the Aide to handle ancillary matters.
Extraverts, thought Myers, would be like a team where the Aide works inside a tent and the General greets and discusses outside people. Introverts, thought Myers, worked the opposite way: their General works in the tent, out of sight, and they use their Aide to deal with outsiders. Thus the primary strengths of introverts tend not to be visible when you first meet them. You have to get to know them a while before you get invited into the tent. Extraverts, on the other hand, show you their strongest hand when they first meet you; their energies are invested mostly in the outer world of dealing with strangers and acquaintances. Their Aide works behind the scenes, giving them information and alternate viewpoints that their General can apply in the ever-pressing business outside.
Myers further thought that a person whose preferred judging function ("rational function") was extraverted would tend to prefer an organized, planned, scheduled lifestyle while a person whose preferred perceiving function ("irrational function") was extraverted would tend to prefer to react spontaneously to things as they come, not imposing a preconceived order.
Hence the fourth letter. For extraverts, it refers to their dominant function. For example, an E__J's dominant function is either Extraverted Thinking or Extraverted Feeling, attitudes of rational management of one's relation to other people. For introverts, the fourth letter refers to their auxiliary function. For example, an I__P's dominant function is either Introverted Thinking or Introverted Feeling, attitudes of seeking inner attunement to the world in ways that are often idiosyncratic and not so easily expressed in public give-and-take. That's right, for introverts the P means that their dominant function is one of judging and J means that their dominant function is one of perceiving. For extraverts, it's the other way around.
So what are all these "functions" and things!?
Well, that's what this whole wiki is about. Click the links and explore.