The Surprising Impetus Behind the Creation of the MBTI – World Peace?

This holiday season we saw the return of our troops from Iraq after 8 long years of war.  The cost: 4500 American deaths, 100,000 Iraqi deaths, 32,000 US injuries and according to some experts, a price tag of over $3 Trillion.  The end of our military stay in Iraq was a holiday gift for our country and untold numbers of families and troops who were reunited.  But there is no arguing that the price of war is great.  We honor those who defend our country as we are simultaneously distressed by the human sacrifice.

Isabel Myers and her mother Katharine Briggs experienced this distress following the US entry into World War II.  As students of human behavior, they were determined to do something to help people resolve conflict rather than fight each other.  They also sought to help women contribute to the war effort by doing work that was satisfying to them. 

Thus, the mother-daughter team set out on a journey to construct a “paper- and- pencil” assessment that would help people gain access to finding their psychological type as outlined by C.G. Jung.  They chose to work with Jungian personality theory because they thought it to be the best model for understanding human nature that they had come across.  In fact, Katharine Briggs, who had been creating her own model for understanding people, said of Jung’s psychological types, “this is it”; and she proceeded to throw away her work!

From that point forward Isabel Myers worked tirelessly to create an instrument that would point us to an understanding of our psychological type.  She gave us a great gift by bucking the prevailing notion in psychology that we are all somehow mere deviations from “normal” (I am pretty sure this notion still exists!).  The Indicator and her later publication of Gifts Differing, continues to point us in that direction.

So, how might the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator translate to the possibility of world peace?  Stay with me for a moment…

It boils down to what Jung called “projection”.  Projection is a part of the human condition, and something of which we are mostly unaware.  It occurs when we take the qualities in ourselves that we have disowned and are unconscious of (our shadow) and “assign” them to another person.  In the case of negative projection – what we embody, but want to suppress – we attribute to others; we move whatever is causing us the problem outward, instead of looking inward to bring it to light.  Unconsciously, we experience cognitive dissonance (the feeling of uncomfortable tension from holding two conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time); unable to resolve the internal issue, we blame, reject, judge, degrade, accuse, or otherwise malign the “other” in the situation.

Let’s take a simple example.  The other day, I asked my husband what he may have learned from understanding typology and living with someone that is his opposite in many ways.  He stated, “I have learned that some people are really not being rude, or discounting me or my opinion when they interrupt me; they are Extraverts; it’s their way of adding to the conversation.  I used to think they were not only rude, but arrogant and self-promoting – they thought their ideas were the best so they would just steamroll right over me.”  

I hear similar projections at the beginning of each and every workshop I facilitate.  Sensing types think intuitive types are “out there”, flighty, a bit nutty or unrealistic.  Intuitive types see sensing types as uncreative, slow, and boring.  Thinking types describe feeling types as being too emotional, too invested in people, wishy-washy, insincere, and “touchy-feely”, and feeling types see thinking types as cold, harsh, tough, and unfeeling.  Danielle Poirier, in her blog Typology, Seismology [Click here] said that her projections around the Judging preference were especially problematic and, “… the one imposing the deadline is, of course…the evil warlord, the despot, the fascist.”!  

So you see, in Myers-Briggs/Jungian terminology, we project negative words, thoughts and images onto anyone who presents an opposite preference; anyone with whom we are not naturally comfortable.  The process they are using conflicts with our identity – or with who we think we are and simultaneously with whom we think (mistakenly) the other person is.  We experience the function that the person is using as “negative” and define the person as so; it’s easier than having to wrestle with that inside of ourselves!  When we experience someone with the same preferences as we have, we tend to affirm them; when someone’s preferences are opposite to ours, we project.

That is because if you aren’t comfortable with a preference or a function, are not skilled in its use, and it primarily lies in your unconscious world, to use it feels as if you, yourself were being [put in all of those negative words] – it would be foreign to your identity and expressed with very little skill and discomfort – like writing with your non-preferred hand; think of how that would look and feel!

So, where were we, world peace?

You can see how these negative projections, even when not expressed outwardly, can be fostered and fester, and cause dislike, hate, and even be said to contain evil – toward the individual who has been the “object” of the projection.  The implications on an individual level are interpersonal conflict – wrought with misunderstanding, judgments and missed opportunity for people to come together – friends, family, spouses, children, teams, groups, Boards of Directors, political leaders, etc. etc.….

I have not found evidence to back this, but I believe that Isabel, as a student of Jung, understood what Jung said of the implications of projection when we move beyond inter-personal relationships to the collective. 

“It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself, by foisting it off on somebody else.” (Jung, The Undiscovered Self, p. 55).

In other words, at the collective level, projection leads to war.

Here is where Myers-Briggs Type within the context of Jungian psychology comes into play…(finally!).  It takes self-awareness or self-knowledge for each of us to remove our projections from others thus reversing the process.  Without that awareness, we don’t stand much chance of resolving differences or changing our negative thoughts about others; our conflicts remain unresolved, even if they appear to be resolved on the outside – those thoughts we have of the other surface again from time to time.  Understanding our type and how others are different from us fosters conflict resolution.  As Myers said in Gifts Differing (pg. 115),

“Disagreement suddenly becomes less irritating when Smith recognizes that it would hardly be normal for Jones to agree.  Jones starts from a different point of view and proceeds in a different direction…it is not from being willfully contrary, but from simply being a different type.”

Is it realistic to think that a tool such as the Myers-Briggs can lead to world peace?

Jung said that it may take hundreds and hundreds of years for man to come to the realization, on a collective level, that it is he who is the problem.  Yet we must move the psychic consciousness of the collective forward, one person at a time, or our fate as humanity will be sealed.  The MBTI and psychological type are tools that we can use to foster love toward our fellow man; our friends, family, spouses, children, teams, groups, Boards of Directors, political leaders, etc. etc.…As Jung said, “…nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement [his emphasis] more than the mutual withdrawal of projections….where love stops, power begins, and violence and terror.”   

One person at a time…