Myers, Briggs, and the Age of Self-Actualization

I think science may lack the data the soul possesses.—Katherine Cook Briggs

If men came like shoes, with the most vital data as to size and style marked outside the box, many a cramping misfit could be avoided.—Isabel Briggs Myers

In the last years of the nineteenth century, Katharine Cook Briggs did something remarkable with her living room. A Michigan-born, college-educated mother and homemaker, she was preternaturally energetic, full of ideas, and having a hard time finding an outlet for her learning. After losing two sons in infancy, she’d decided that she had found her calling, a place to put everything she had, and that place was her daughter, Isabel, born in 1897. Before Isabel’s first birthday, Briggs had patented what today would be called a “parenting style,” naming it “obedience curiosity training,” homing in on a place where, in the Victorian age, the mind of an educated woman...