Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type

Many of the popular books treat type theory as a flat space of 16 static types. Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers understood and developed Jung's theoretical framework, and the dynamical theory is very clearly explained in Chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 3 outlines the original MBTI empirical research, showing the impact of type on chosen occupations - this is still striking. Part 2 of the book is a systematic examination of the four dimensions of type theory, and includes familiar portraits of the 16 types. Parts III and IV of the book are what you might call 'applications of type theory'. Other reviewers have dismissed these as an eclectic collection of dull chapters: I can only say that I found them an illuminating example of the power of type theory to shed light on many areas of life which appear at first sight to lack unifying features.

If you read this book first, it is then worth looking at David Keirsey's "Please Understand me II" for the encyclopedic number of insights he documents. Hower, with Keirsey you get the empiricist rejection of the Jungian paradigm as somehow "unscientific". (Keirsey's approach seems reminiscent of the view from physics: a computer science or AI approach has considerably fewer conceptual qualms with the kind of internal personality "architecture" presupposed by the Jungian paradigm).

Beyond Keirsey there is "Personality Type : An Owner's Manual" by Lenore Thomson. This is like the post-grad version of "Gifts Differing", and additionally includes a Jungian critique of Keirsey's work and Temperament Theory. After the obligatory low-powered introductory chapters, it's hard going, but essential.


Big Disappointment   July 30, 1999
 36 out of 40 found this review helpful

_Gifts Differing_ sets out to explain the theory behind the Meyers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). I was looking forward to reading this book, because I hoped that it would expand my knowledge and understanding of type theory. I wanted a deeper understanding so I could bring my knowledge of type theory to bear in even more contexts than I do already.

I anticipated an eloquently written and stimulating outline of Type theory, but was discouraged by what I found in the book. The writing was dry and bland, and I often found myself reading several paragraphs before I realized that I didn't remember one thing that I had read.

Also, the book's target audience seemed to be inconsistent. At times the authors seemed to be writing for someone who had never before studied the MBTI, and at other times they seemed to be writing for people who were already expert at the system. For example, they frequently wrote of effect introverted and extraverted forms of a process have on a personality, yet they never explained what the differences were between the introverted and extraverted forms of a function.

The last part of the book contains several chapters which try to relate common experiences to type theory. There's a chapter on marriage, choice of occupation, early childhood learning, and a couple others. These chapters were all duds without exception, and the chapter on childhood was the most irrelevant. They made a brief mention of the cognitive processes at work in early childhood, and spent the rest of the chapter proselyzing on how to raise our children, how we should accept them for whatever type they are, etc..

Overall, this book contained a few nuggets of useful information, but the rest was poorly explained, poorly organized, and poorly written. Not recommended.


Useful background, but won't help you discover your type   June 4, 1998
 24 out of 25 found this review helpful

This book gives an overview of the history and theory behind the widely used Myers-Briggs personality type inventory, and briefly but thoroughly summarizes the characteristics of each personality type as well as the "groups" of related types. This is straight from the horse's mouth: Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine Briggs, developed the inventory based on Jung's theory of psychological types, and tested it extensively before it became widely used. The book is generally well organized, easy to read, and clearly written, with occasional touches of humor. But it won't help you identify your type if you don't already know it -- I recommend Kiersey's "Please Understand Me" for that. Still, it's a good resource if you already know your type and want to find out more about it. (Incidentally, you don't have to swallow Jung's psychological theories whole in order to find the Myers-Briggs useful!)