Forthcoming from Archive House. Cover in preparation.
Documentary history · E. Marteck
Typology Before the Tests
A Documentary History from Jung's Psychological Types to the MBTI and the Rise of Contemporary Typology Cultures
From Jung's 1921 text to Katharine Cook Briggs, Isabel Briggs Myers, and the making of the world's most widely used personality instrument. The history that was not fully written until now.
In 1921, Carl Jung published Psychological Types: a clinical-observational framework built from more than a decade of analytic practice and an ambitious survey of how typological thinking had appeared across philosophy, aesthetics, psychopathology, and biography. Within forty years, a version of that framework had become the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a standardized self-report personality test eventually administered to millions of people annually. The transformation between those two things is what this book documents.
Typology Before the Tests is a primary-source documentary history that follows the record from Jung's 1921 publication through Katharine Cook Briggs's pre-Jungian typological system and her encounter with Psychological Types, through Isabel Briggs Myers's wartime development of the first type indicator and its difficult path to publication, through the MBTI's institutional adoption and the formation of a practitioner culture, and into the divergence between that culture and its Jungian origins. It ends at the emergence of the contemporary typology subcultures (socionics, the cognitive functions communities, the online type-identity world) that are the living inheritors of the transformation.
The book is documentary in method: it keeps separate what the primary sources establish, what participants said of their own work, and what the author interprets. It is not a debunking exercise. It is the historical account that practitioners, historians, and serious readers of the typology tradition have not had: a sourced, careful, and intellectually honest telling of how a clinical-observational framework became a personality-products industry, and what was lost in the making.
Publication
The third Marteck title from Archive House, following Serious Typology and Reading Psychological Types . Publication date, format, and extent will be confirmed closer to release. Register interest to be notified on publication.
Review copies
Press, reviewers, and course instructors can register interest through the contact form; choose "Review copy" as the subject. Archive House will respond when advance copies exist.
How to cite
Marteck, E. Typology Before the Tests: A Documentary History from Jung's Psychological Types to the MBTI and the Rise of Contemporary Typology Cultures. Archive House, forthcoming.