As a student of fashion and its ability to psychologically transform, I have become mildly obsessed with “depth” level of advertising -- motivational analysis and other black-art hoodoo that corporate witch-doctors deploy at consumers. Humans have an awesomely predictable inability to resist handbags, footwear and watches when sold with provocative images -- usually involving Sex or Death or both.
In the last few years, there has been a bit of a sea-change in the subliminal motivation racket, as it pertains to branding and advertising. Mad Men and other corporate land-sharks that feed in the oceans of your subconscious have been using the old Freudian sex/death whiplash to sell you handbags and hair straighteners and proto-Spanxx
practically since the beginning of the 20th century.
But the latest studies in motivational psychology have taken a new side in the ongoing ideological war between dear old Sigmund and his upstart student, Karl Jung. As it happens, archetype psychology, with its narrative approach to knowing the self -- the personal, mythological journey of the Hero with a Thousand Faces, etc. that Joseph Campbell has been chirping about on PBS for decades -- turns out to contain even more ruthless subliminal sales techniques than the old Sex and Death routines. Everything Jung is new again in ad world. The powers that Brand have been following their bliss with renewed zeal, and imbuing corporations with their own origin stories. Corporations aren’t just people in the political sense, anymore -- consumers, as it happens, are even more fond of their corporate citizens when these corporations are given origin stories that speak of the brands as if they had souls. A soda can isn’t just a soda can - it’s also an inspiring, metaphysical journey.
I recently visited my dear friend Dr. Julie Steward, a literary theory professor in Alabama, due a mutually absorbing curiosity about the old Myers-Briggs personality test -- one of the more popular Jungian devices that has been gaining new traction of late. ‘Gurl,” Dr. Julie exhorted. “My friends Babs and Alecia just took a huge-ass seminar on it and now they want to officially use us as guinea pigs for their new learnings.”
70 years ago, Catherine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, were both students of Karl Jung. They became fascinated by his 32-type personality assessment method, which was based on discovering which of four psychological functions -- Sensation, Intuition, Feeling, and Thinking - was the most dominant in the way the test subjects experienced their worlds. Ms. Briggs and Ms. Myers became fascinated by the test and what they could extrapolate from it - they enjoyed springing it on their unsuspecting house-guests as a kind of parlor game. Being rather intellectually obstreperous ladies, they ended up revising Dr. Jung’s test, which they found slightly undercooked; they were compelled to add touches of their own.
Over years of fooling around, the ladies refined the test down to 16 personality “types,” and added a new category “Judging/ Perceiving” to reflect how a person most comfortably prefers to interact with his or her external world. The subjective, they felt (considered a rather feminine attribute) was obviously most important when it came to matters of personal preference.
The Myers-Briggs version of Jung’s test gained a respectable foothold during WWII when women entered the workforce for the first time; employers found it helpful in determining what kind of work might be most suitable to a lady’s natural temperament.
Even today, the test is still considered a substantial arrow in the quiver of human resources-tools.
Myers and Briggs based their alterations of Jung’s original test on the generally accepted idea that people tend to nurture “type biases” -- i.e., we tend to gravitate toward people and situations that look like us and act like us, and reflect our own preferences and behaviors. This habit of type bias, the ladies felt, was an unfortunate human handicap. It stood to reason: if we only hang around with people exactly like ourselves, we unwittingly expose ourselves to the danger of becoming dull, narrow-minded and intolerant. Understanding and appreciating differences in human personalities was key, the ladies felt, to cultivating greater understanding and breadth of character. The more we understood the preferences of our exotic neighbors, the less likely we were to stumble into grave misunderstandings, diplomatic failures and gangland rumbles with them.
Dr. Julie and I were curious to see if the test confirmed and gave legitimate, social-scientific reasons for us to believe how fabulous we think we are.
So, in the interest of trailblazing new pathways for the cause of fashion intelligence, I flew to the Deep South to formally take the Myers Briggs Type Indicator personality exam from two newly certified practitioners: Babs Dawson and her partner Alesia Adams.
“I love type theory because I believe it can enhance any relationship,” Babs enthused, practically jumping around in her chair on Dr. Julie’s cocktail patio. “Not to mention, once you start thinking about type, I swear, you'll never watch a movie the same way again.”
A bottle of Sauvignon Blanc was cracked, bits of identifying jewelry were placed on the stems of the wine glasses, and Babs and Alecia commenced administering the test to Dr. Julie and I.
Babs, an excitable little lady who manages one of Birmingham’s better restaurants, was keen to emphasize that the “instrument,” which reduces a personality to a four letter “type key,” is mainly about your preferences. “It determines how the subject prefers to take in information, and make decisions around that information to orient herself in the world. People use all the mental functions to some degree -- no type code is ‘better’ or ‘healthier’ than any of the others.” All of the personalities, she insisted, brought a valuable diversity of skills and insights to the workplace and/or community.
Any serious clotheshorse and/or drag queen understands the totemic power of clothing items, and their transformative ability to cultivate character.
Babs and Alesia were comfortably dressed in beige polar fleece and rubber clogs. They were already poking each other and whispering guesses as to what four-letter personality type I was, presumably due to the fact that I happened to be wearing a black satin hoodie and a Flavor-Flav-style flat-brim baseball hat slathered in metallic dollar signs.
The test takes about ten minutes to get through - it’s a series of questions forcing a Yes or No answer that determines your personal preferences by breaking them down into sets of dichotomies (e.g. Extravert vs. Introvert, Judging vs. Perceiving.)
There are many iterations of test on the internet -- one may take some variation of the test online and get a generally reliable idea of what the Myers-Briggs instrument would determine your psychological personality “type” to be. This, however, is just the surface level of information - a deeper look into the Myers-Briggs involves a whole level of what Babs called “human calculus.”
By figuring out your “dominant” personality characteristics, you learn how your type best functions in the world when you are performing at your best -- when you are the self you think you are, and wish to project. But for every conscious preference, or “dominant” trait -- there is an equal and opposite characteristic -- when you are sick or peevish, our personalties tend to present as the exact opposite characteristics. When you are at your worst. By learning about your “inverted” traits, according to Myers-Briggs enthusiasts, one can know oneself better and work consciously on character weaknesses.
I was also wondering if I might apply the test to my ongoing studies of fashion. Could one therapeutically dress, according to the Myers-Briggs type indicator, if one wanted to develop a more well-rounded character through her wardrobe? How might an extraverted person cultivate a wardrobe that would aid her in learning to be more introspective?
Mexican wrestling masks, I reasoned, are a terrible way to meet new people -- did I, perhaps need more of them? How, I wondered, might an introvert become more of an extravert? Spurs? Metallic unitards? A Darth Vader helmet?
During the test, I found myself becoming increasingly convinced that everyone who wasn’t my exact type were boring, narrow-minded jerks. “Who ARE these joyless feebs who aren’t me?” I shrieked. “I am SO glad I don’t know any! They all sound like Nazi accountants.”
Babs and Alecia giggled and winked at one another.
My type was ENFP -- which happened to be the same type as Dr. Julie, (and also the same type as Oprah). We smugly nodded at one another.
But I was rattled. Regardless of my Oprah-likeness -- if I was to judge myself according to the Myers-Briggs test, according to my own social and fashion prescriptions -- then I would have to dress significantly less gangsta, and considerably more polah -- and probably find some Republicans to hang out with.
Some heroic journeys, I decided, were simply too costly. Joseph Campbell could rise from the grave and drag me by my neck to the middle of Wisconsin and peel off my black vinyl parka with a sardine key, but even if the polar zip-vest was made of the Golden Fleece itself, I would proudly freeze to death. Not for nothing had I avoided the temptation of rubber clogs all my life, even though they look really comfy.
Later that month, I realized I was truly boorish and narrow-minded: the lovely Babs sent me a fabulous t-shirt featuring a highly stylized design by a Spanish tattoo artist: a squid was emerging out of the hollow face of a well-groomed man with pomaded hair.
Brother, I thought, to the squid-man. You have truly evolved.
JUNGIAN TYPE-KEY PARTY !