| When I
was a teenager the worst thing you could say about a prospective
blind date was that she had a great personality. The more glowing
the endorsement of what was on the inside of your proposed partner,
the more likely you weren’t going to like what was on the
outside. In the world of adolescent dating “a great personality”
was code for “unattractive,” the kiss of death for
the average teenager.
I won’t quibble with adolescents over their concept of attractiveness.
Who am I to fight hormones and culture? Instead, I’d like
to take issue with the concept of personality itself, as the epithet,
“great personality,” would appear to define it.
Everyone knows that we all present different sides of our self
to different people in different situations. Words like “great”
to describe a personality fall far short of touching on the complex,
shifting reality of how we put ourselves forward and are perceived
in the world.
Is there then something less shifting that underlies what we call
personality? Practitioners of many strains of Buddhism would answer
“no.” They speak of the absence of a self. Boundaries
between a person and the world amount to no more than a field
of consciousness in a physical body.
The absence of a fixed self is fine, when it comes to the sorts
of deeply existential questions whose answers may lead to enlightenment.
And it certainly helps our compassion to remember that people
don’t fall into neat categories, like good people with great
personalities whom we love and evil people with terrible personalities
whom we hate.
Still, it’s nice to have some tangible tools to lend substance
to our understanding of the people we encounter. Wielded properly,
we can use these tools to increase our range of compassion.
One such instrument is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
This psychological test is based on theories of personality elucidated
by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist who might be described as Sigmund
Freud’s mystical disciple. Since it was published in 1962,
the MBTI has been scientifically proven to be valid and useful
in a huge range of settings, from individual counseling to managing
large corporations.
The current version of the test includes 93 forced-choice questions,
meaning the test-taker has to choose between “yes”
and “no,” “true” and “false,”
or two other alternatives for each item. One question, for example,
asks to choose between, “I like to be the center of attention,”
versus “I am content to be on the sidelines.” When
the test is scored, the answers generate a report that yields
a personality type, based on four axes. I’ll use some of
my own descriptions, followed by the official MBTI shorthand,
for the axes of personality type: extroverted/introverted (E vs
I); detail-oriented/big-picture oriented (S vs N); rational/emotional
(T vs F); and planning/spontaneous (J vs P).
I’m an INFP, which means: I tend toward spending time alone;
prefer viewing things from 40,000 feet rather than from ground
level; am more likely to respond with my heart than my head; and
am inclined to just see what happens rather than to plan my next
move. I’m near the middle on three of the axes and have
actually oscillated between slightly introverted and slightly
extroverted at different times I’ve taken the test. MBTI
type, like personality itself, is certainly mutable.
The one axis that I skew is the S/N axis. I’m what’s
called a “high N,” meaning I love theories, the larger
the better, and tend to get bored by details. To be sure, I can
do details. In order to become and to stay a doctor I’ve
had to pass plenty of tests that demand detailed answers. Given
my druthers, though, I will approach an area of knowledge from
its larger principles. Once I grasp these principles I feel I
can fill in details as needed, without having to commit much to
memory. I hate memorization.
I was a philosophy major in college because it looked to me like
philosophy was about the largest ideas. When I got to medical
school I did well in the basic sciences of physiology, pathology,
microbiology, and pharmacology, which attempt to understand the
human organism. On the other hand, I had trouble with biochemistry
and anatomy, which looked to me mostly like masses of details
to be committed to rote memory.
Over years of practicing medicine I don’t believe my patients
with gout (a disease in which an elevated concentration of uric
acid in the bloodstream can produce inflamed joints and kidney
stones) have suffered for having a doctor who cannot name the
enzymes in the chain of chemical reactions that degrades nucleic
acids to uric acid. I do believe, though, that my credibility
as a teacher and colleague has suffered at times because of my
high N-ness.
Doctors tend to be detail-oriented S’s. So do engineers
and accountants. If we don’t start out that way, training
is liable to make us so. The emphasis in all this professional
education is on precise data and exact reasoning. Perspective
and intuition, also perfectly valid and sometimes indispensable
ways of knowing, tend to be ignored or devalued.
Though my patient outcomes are as good as any, I sometimes don’t
sound as credible to my high-S students and colleagues as someone
who appears to really care about the names of all those enzymes.
To a high-S, a high-N may come across as a flake.
So I’ve learned over the years, when I talk with students
and colleagues, to pepper my speech with enough hard facts to
reassure them that I really know what I’m talking about.
I’ve also come to grasp, thanks in part to multiple encounters
with the Meyers-Briggs, that sometimes I’ll have to listen,
without interrupting, to an excruciatingly detailed description
of a case if a high-S student or colleague is to feel that he’s
gotten his money’s worth out of consulting me.
I could go on and on with examples of MBTI personality types and
how understanding them can smooth a relationship. But that’s
not the point of this piece. Rather, I present the Myers-Briggs
instrument as one more beam of light on the middle way, somewhere
between a concept of fixed personality and no self at all. The
MBTI is an example of a modern scientific tool that, applied correctly,
can nudge us along the path to compassion and enlightenment.
Marc Ringel has spent the majority of his career
as a family doctor working in rural communities, including the
last 12 years in Brush, Colorado. He has written extensively,
for lay and professional audiences, about rural health, medical
informatics and healing.
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