ISABEL MCKELVEY BRIGGS was born on October 18, 1897, in Washington, DC. Her father was Lyman J. Briggs, a renowned physicist and, for twelve years, the director of the National Bureau of Standards. Her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs, was a woman who, in many ways, was ahead of her time: She was an honors graduate of Michigan State University; she educated her daughter, Isabel, at home; and she worked hard at a writing career, publishing short stories, editorials, and articles on education. One of her stories, titled “Father’s Library,” anticipated by almost two decades Virginia Woolf’s feminist essay A Room of One’s Own.
Encouraged by her interest in learning to build the characters for the fiction that she wanted to write, Katharine Briggs embarked on a project of reading autobiographies and developing her own typology based on the patterns she found. She eventually identified several types, which she labeled “meditative,” “spontaneous,” “executive,” and “sociable”—later identified in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (the MBTI or the “Indicator”) as the Is, the EPs, the ETJs, and the EFJs. In 1923, Carl Gustav Jung’s Psychological Types appeared in an English translation. Upon discovering it, Katharine Briggs is alleged to have said to Isabel, “This is it!” and abandoned her own typology for Jung’s. From then on, both mother and daughter became avid observers of type. Over the next two decades, Briggs occasionally corresponded with, and once met with, Jung, who encouraged her in her work.
Isabel read widely all her life. She loved to write and began her own career as a published writer at the age of fourteen with “A Little Girl’s Letter,” appearing in Ladies Home Journal. She published several stories and poems over the next decade. Isabel entered Swarthmore College in 1915 and graduated with highest honors four years later. It was here that she met and married Clarence G. Myers (known as Chief).
In August, 1928, Isabel Myers read an announcement in New McClure’s magazine that they and Frederick A. Stokes Company were jointly sponsoring a contest for best mystery detective novel. Undeterred by two small children and a seemingly impossible December 31 deadline, she decided to enter the contest—and won! The nationwide publicity that followed the appearance of Murder Yet to Come identified Isabel Briggs Myers as a promising young writer. Before the year was over, the book was a best-seller and in its seventh printing. After a second mystery novel and a brief excursion into theater, she put writing aside in order to devote the next eight years to raising her children.
The onset of World War II made dramatically clear to Isabel Myers the extent to which human differences can cause misunderstandings—even to the point of threatening an entire civilization. She wanted to find a way for people to understand rather than to destroy each other. She also became particularly interested in finding a way to help people, and especially women, fit into the new jobs that were created by the war effort and those vacated by men serving in the armed forces. In 1942, Myers read about a new “people-sorting instrument,” the Humm-Wadsworth Scale, which was developed to fit workers to jobs. From her own experience, she believed the understanding and appreciation of individual differences that flows naturally from Jung’s theory would be a valuable aid to self-understanding and the understanding of others. She once again set out to do the impossible—she decided to develop her own instrument.
From her father, Isabel Myers had learned that one of the most exciting things in life is to discover something not yet known, or to do something not yet done. And from the unconventional education she received from her mother, she learned that one does not need formal training to accomplish a goal—there are always books and resources at hand when needed. Thus she began to work seriously to expand the Jungian ideas of type that her mother had been quietly studying for two decades.
Over the rest of her life, Myers worked on development of various forms of her personality inventory. Form A of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator appeared in 1943, and Form C appeared in 1944. An introvert, Myers worked largely alone, taking each of Jung’s propositions and finding ways from her own experience to use and extend them. She did not work entirely alone, however. She apprenticed herself to Edward N. Hay, the director of personnel for a large Philadelphia bank, who taught her what she needed to know about test construction and validity. She then began gathering data for her own validity studies by persuading principals of schools in eastern Pennsylvania to permit her to administer her tests to thousands of students.
A major milestone in the development of the MBTI personality inventory came when she persuaded (with the help of her father) the dean of the George Washington School of Medicine to permit her to test the freshmen at his school. This was the beginning of a sample that eventually included 5,355 medical students, one of the largest longitudinal studies in medicine. She also collected, on her own, a sample of 10,000 nursing students from 71 different schools to whom her test was administered.
In 1956, Henry Chauncey, president of Educational Testing Service (ETS), learned about Myers’ work from Harold C. Wiggers, dean of one of the medical schools that participated in her studies. Chauncey asked David Saunders, a psychologist on his staff, to find out about the instrument. Saunders invited Myers to present a seminar to the research division at ETS. After listening to her discussion of the development and application of the Indicator up to that point (Form C), Saunders was deeply impressed:
Clearly, here was the most carefully constructed self-report inventory in psychological history, and all the more remarkable for its having been built without benefit of formal psychological training. This whole episode will certainly stand as one of the most exciting experiences of my professional life.
His enthusiasm never waned. Reflecting on the years he spent working with Myers, Saunders commented: “Isabel Myers had an excellent intuitive feel for what had to be done statistically.... She was doing things far beyond the state of the art. Indeed, some of these things are still beyond the state of the art.”
In the spring of 1957, ETS agreed to publish the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. By fall, Myers had developed Form D, which contained 300 items on which she wanted data, and ETS began testing the form in schools in the Philadelphia area. A year later, Form F, which contained 166 of the best items and was to be the standard for the next 20 years, was developed. It is still in use.
In 1975, CPP, Inc. became the publisher of the MBTI personality inventory, and for the first time, it became widely available to the clinical psychological and counseling communities. It is now the most extensively used personality instrument in history. It was here that John D. Black, the company’s founder, encouraged Myers to write Gifts Differing, which explains the theory behind the MBTI personality inventory and was to become the sum-mary of and final comment on her life’s work. Her original preface to the book, reprinted here in its entirety, expresses her beautifully simple dream for humanity—to help people make the greatest use of their differing gifts.
This book is written in the belief thatmany problems might be dealt with more successfully if approached in the light of C. G. Jung’s theory of psychological types. The first English translation of his Psychological Types was published by Harcourt Brace in 1923. My mother, Katharine C. Briggs, introduced it into our family and made it a part of our lives. She and I waited a long time for someone to devise an instrument that would reflect not only one’s preference for extraversion or introversion but one’s preferred kind of perception and judgment as well. In the summer of 1942 we undertook to do it ourselves. Since then the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator has yielded a wide range of information about the practical bearings of type.
The implications of the theory, however, go beyond statistics and can be expressed only in human terms. Gifts Differing presents an informal account of type and its consequences as they have appeared to us over the years. In this material I hope parents, teachers, students, counselors, clinicians, clergy—and all others who are concerned with the realization of human potential—may find a rationale for many of the personality differences they encounter in their work
It has taken three generations to make this book: the deep insight of my mother’s (INFJ) introverted intuition into the meaning of type; my own (INFP) introverted-feeling conviction about the importance of type’s practical applications; and my (ENFP) son Peter’s invaluable combination of extravert viewpoint, intuitive drive, gift of expression, and sense of priorities—without which these pages might never have been finished.
Despite a long and protracted battle with cancer, Isabel Myers completed her book shortly before she died. Gifts Differing was published posthumously, just a few months after her death. It remains a tribute to her lifetime appreciation for the beauty, strength, and infinite possibilities of human personality in all its fascinating varieties.
Saunders, Frances W. Katharine and Isabel: Mother’s Light, Daughter’s Journey. Mountain View, CA: CPP, Inc., 1991.
“An Appreciation of Isabel Briggs Myers.” MBTI News 2, no. 4 (July 1980): 1–7.