Tag Archives: Myers-Briggs

The Self-Balancing Functions of Personality

There are many personality calculators, each trying to give us an accurate and helpful picture of who we are and how we might play well with others. I remember a quiz given to my General Psychology class, which paired a profile with a biblical character. Which figure from the Bible do you most resemble? (The guy who got paired with Judas went on to become a politician.)

The Myers-Briggs test isn’t one I ever had to take, but it’s widely accepted as a solid measure of personality (with some opposition). Ruth Johnston points out that this profiler has its strengths, but like with other tests, people can easily get the impression that their personality is a bit like a cafeteria meal, each piece selected independently. In her book, Re-Modeling the Mind: Personality in Balance, she presents a model for understanding personality “as an interacting, self-balancing system.”

Lily Macro Retouched

Johnston has studied the roots of the Myers-Briggs indicator, the work of Carl Jung, and found what she believes to be a relevant model for understanding personality. “Jung’s personality system had leapfrogged over some of the 20th century psychological assumptions that are now being discarded. His model had been rejected by academic psychology long ago, but it actually suited the new neuroscience ideas very well.”  Continue reading The Self-Balancing Functions of Personality