I have taken many Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) tests in my time, and I love striking up a conversation about it and getting to know my friends better through it. But I can never quite take the tests seriously, partly because I can tell that the questions polarize the different kinds of personality traits from the start and because of the historical beginnings of the theory in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic tradition.

Psychoanalysis treats patients as spectators in their own drama, featuring the hidden characters of their complex and hidden, subconscious self.  Dictionary.com defines psychoanalysis as “a method of explaining and treating mental and emotional problems by having the patient talk about dreams, feelings, memories, etc.”  

Often in psychoanalysis the analyst assumes the patient suffers from unconscious desires and suppressed memories and behaves in illogical ways as a result.  

Although some of these analysts may have it right when they take a patient who suffered traumatic life circumstances, others, like Freud, really took psychoanalysis to the next level, attributing curious sexual conditions and personality disorders to all members of the human race and working their way up from there. 

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman has a lot to say about psychoanalysis in volume one of his famous lecture series.  He condemns psychoanalysis for not treating the subjects of attempted study neutrally, but rather bringing in loads of presupposition about the cause and effect relationships working in the human mind.

“Incidentally, psychoanalysis is not a science: it is at best a medical process, and perhaps even more like witch-doctoring,” Feynman said.  

And so we see a lack of scientific rigor condemns psychoanalysis’s end value, and unfortunately, the MBTI tests are mostly based on the works of Freud and Carl Jung.

Jung was a colleague of Freud’s who did much to further the field of analytical psychology as an empirical science rather than biased. About.com shows that Jung wanted to separate himself from Freud’s wilder notions: “Jung wanted to understand the symbolic meaning of the contents of the unconscious. In order to distinguish between individual psychology and psychoanalysis, Jung gave his discipline the name ‘analytical psychology.’”  Jung may have helped develop a new science, but one still heavily based on Freud’s psychoanalysis, and so consequently, subject to scrutiny.  

Analytical psychology and the analysis of behaviors and common thought processes later led several scientists to develop the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator system. The tests and its results are fun to look at and spend some time learning and understanding, but they are not hard facts and your personality type is not set in stone.  

We should avoid giving too much weight to these personality type characterizations and instead focus on learning more about ourselves, what makes each of us go and how we work the best.  

If MBTI tests help you understand yourself better, then by all means go for it, but try to have a more relaxed view of the results and be willing to challenge your stated personality type.  Too often in college and life in general we allow ourselves to fit into our chosen stereotypes, fulfilling the roles we have chosen for ourselves.  This kind of attitude, governed by submission to labels and profiling, leads to a generally more boring life where we may misjudge any social interactions and relationships upon which a more open and free mindset would have capitalized.  

Don’t put yourself in a box, but rather study how you think and act and try to learn from yourself.