JUNGIAN TYPOLOGY POST #4: A BOOK REVIEW OF "GIFTS DIFFERING " BY BRIGGS AND MYERS

I just finished reading this book, and I would like to comment on what I thought about it, and how and why I think the divergence from Jung started

I kept reading continually statements made by Briggs and Myers that said since Jung was a psychiatrist, he was only talking about abnormal psychology, and not normal psychology, in Psychological Types. Dear Mrs. Briggs and Mrs. Myers, just because Jung is a psychiatrist, that doesn't mean the only thing he ever talks about in his books is abnormal psychology. Jung actually talked mostly about normal psychology in Psychological Types, inspired likely by his contemporary William Marston, who was a psychologist with a PhD, working with normal psychology. Marston wrote The Emotions Of Normal People in 1928, which was already based off of Jung's judging functions, since I have previously mentioned Jung's judging functions are synonymous with the 4 quadrants of DISC. It's hard to know which came first-the DISC quadrants or the judging functions, but it doesn't matter. Jung was talking about normal psychology, for the most part, in Psychological Types, and Briggs and Myers would have certainly known that if they had ever read The Emotions Of Normal People, but of course, it's obvious they didn't 🙄🥴😡

Second, all the things Briggs and Myers said about introverts are not true. They say that an introvert's true dominant function is not noticeable, because it's turned inward. Therefore, the thing you notice most about introverts is their auxiliary function. That is so not true. They said they were basing this off of Jung saying that introverts were more likely to develop psycological problems because of their inward nature ( Yes, what Jung said is true, but Briggs and Myers, that has nothing to do with how obvious or not a function is).

Anyway, so I went and read the type descriptions of all the introverted types, and saw a trend. For example, even though according to Briggs and Myers, although IxTPs are supposed to be Ti dominant, when you read the type descriptions, the ISTP description sounds more like Si dominance, and the INTP description sounds more like Ni dominance. I then pulled up the DISC profiles, and had them side-by-side with the Briggs Myers type descriptions, and found that , for instance INTP meshes well with Primary C (Ni-t), but clashes a lot with C/I/S (Ti-n). I found this to be true for all the introverted types

Third, and lastly, Briggs and Myers made large, grandiose, sweeping comments on their studies, such as all SFs make good teachers , social workers, and "service with a smile ", not even mentioning that the SFs making up that statistic were almost entirely ESFJs. If they were going to make a blanket statement like that, they should have made it about ESFJs alone, and not included the 3 other SF types in at all.

So, anyway. That's my review of Gifts Differing. Hopefully, it was informative, and you can start to see where the Briggs Myers divergence from Jung actually started