Picture of author.

Tietoja tekijästä

Merve Emre is assistant professor of English at McGill University.
Image credit: from author's website

Tekijän teokset

Associated Works

Merkitty avainsanalla

Yleistieto

Jäseniä

Kirja-arvosteluja

This book was a gift from my daughter Birdy last year, and it is full of gorgeous. Everything about it feels luxurious - the paper, the lovely blue annotations, the artwork and photographs, the maps...This was obviously a labor of love for Merve Emre. I have read Mrs. Dalloway before. And listened to it. I am always amazed by Woolf's use of stream of consciousness and by how she makes the reader aware of the time passing and by how she weaves so many different narratives into a single day. What Emre has done is to give us that alongside so much beautifully choreographed history and diary entries and images that this volume immerses you in Virginia Woolf's London. It is a feast from beginning to end. Highly recommended.… (lisätietoja)
1 ääni
Merkitty asiattomaksi
Crazymamie | Feb 1, 2024 |
Review:
I am not forever changed by this book. But learning the history was rather interesting.

Quotes, notes and snippets:
The theory behind the indicator supports the fact that you are born with a four letter preference. If you hear someone say "my type changed." They are not correct.
And the wolves are the people that want to get in my way, I said with a menacing tone. The other trainees looked at me nervously as if seeing me, the true me, for the first time.
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
untitled841 | 10 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Jul 3, 2023 |
I already knew that the MBTI was not considered valid by psychologists, and that it had been invented by a mother and daughter who were not trained in psychology, so this contained no surprises on that score. The intro to this book makes it seem like there's vast secrets hidden in the archives; nothing quite so thrilling.

Emre has a certain appreciation for Briggs and Myers and their desire to see something positive in all types of personalities; this remains part of the appeal of the MBTI, along with its ability to easily categorize people according to 4 simple traits, classified in a binary manner. The story, while fun and well written, would have benefited from someone with more experience in psychology and personality testing. The lack of validity of the test is fairly easy to demonstrate, especially once you know the history, but it would have benefited at least as well from a wider approach to the science of personality and not just the personalities of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers.… (lisätietoja)
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
arosoff | 10 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Jul 11, 2021 |
The book I've been waiting for since the mid-80s, when the managers where I worked at the time were all made to take the Myers-Briggs "indicator" (as its overlords insist on calling it). Luckily, I was not a manager, but when my manager "suggested" we underlings also take it, I dodged. Intuitively (ahem), it felt flaky and simplistic to me, and I resisted being labeled in such a fashion.

Fast forward 30 years. My current employer imposed something called "Total Insights," a dumbed-down knockoff of the MBTI where they didn't even need to use *words* to describe the profiles, but *colors*! Yay! By this time, I had dialed back from a management position, but our department director "invited" everyone on the department to take this profile. I was, um, out of the office that day. I and one colleague, who had a degree in psychology, were the only two who refused to take it. We work in a large academic medical center, where "evidence-based research" is a holy grail, where protocols, therapies, interventions, policies and procedures are all supposed to be based on evidence. With the obvious exception of HR.

So I thank Merve Emre from the bottom of my heart for this detailed and careful study of Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers and the test they invented. Yes, bottom line is: they made all this stuff up. It grew out of Briggs's obsession with Carl Jung (she emphatically described him as her "personal god," to whose ideas and writings she would devote her life). Jung, a flaky thinker with Nazi sympathies whose patients and acolytes frequently became his bed partners, *also* made all this stuff up. He dreamed up a triad of personality trait pairings. Briggs and Myers sat around their kitchen tables and "profiled" their husbands, kids, and a couple neighbor kids. And ta-daa! The MBTI was born. They set themselves up as counselors - with zero schooling, formal training or any sort of licensing in psychology or counseling and a signal lack of ethics - and profiled people. Briggs latched onto a very troubled teenaged girl in a very creepy way, following her around, examining her, profiling her, writing about her, without any sort of actual consent. Myers went on to carry her mother's torch of obsession, and finally landed a job with a (wait for it...) management consultant. He thought it might be useful, and they started selling it to companies and HR departments, who happily used to it to hire and fire people. A publisher of psychological tools, the Educational Testing Service, got wind of it and hired Myers on - it was cheaper to pay her as a part-time employee than actually buy the rights to it. They then spent years working over the instrument, attempting to validate it. Myers was furious that anyone would dare to tinker with her sacred instrument and stonewalled, complained and was generally a nuisance. The professional analysts found it nearly irredeemably flawed. But it was simple, it was easy to give, a breeze to score (especially with the recent advent of computerized analysis), and businesses loved it. So on it went, to become the juggernaut of nonsense it is today. And making a ton of money for its owners, not only selling the instrument and its scoring, but in the very expensive process of "certifying" HR folks to administer it.

The author attempted to gain access to the archives held by the current owners of the tool. She was told she would have to enroll in a week-long formal certification program at a cost of several thousand dollars. She did, and was still refused permission. It was a cult-like experience, with attendees chanting "Type never changes!" In spite, of course, of the research that demonstrates that half the people who take the instrument get different results if they repeat it. And the explanation for why this happens, according to the MBTI gurus, is so convoluted I could barely follow it... something to do with having taken the test "awakening awareness" of one's traits and so you allow your "real self" to emerge in the later test.

I would love to donate a copy of this book to the library of the organization where I work. But no one would read it. But I hope it will offer some serious backup to employees who wish to resist being pigeonholed into a fabricated category of personality which is no better than a horoscope.
… (lisätietoja)
1 ääni
Merkitty asiattomaksi
JulieStielstra | 10 muuta kirja-arvostelua | May 17, 2021 |

Palkinnot

You May Also Like

Associated Authors

Tilastot

Teokset
6
Also by
1
Jäseniä
512
Suosituimmuussija
#48,444
Arvio (tähdet)
½ 3.4
Kirja-arvosteluja
12
ISBN:t
27
Kielet
1

Taulukot ja kaaviot