From Fictional Detectives to Real-Life Types: The Art of Self-Creation in ‘The Personality Brokers’

How Writing Stories—and Ourselves—Shaped the World’s Most Famous Personality Test

Before she was known as a pioneer of personality testing, Isabel Briggs Myers was a prize-winning mystery novelist. Her fiction, filled with detectives of every disposition, became a playground for exploring the nuances of character and motivation. As Merve Emre shows in The Personality Brokers, the line between storytelling and self-discovery is surprisingly thin.

Isabel’s approach to personality was shaped by her love of narrative. She believed that, like characters in a novel, people could be understood—and even changed—through the stories they told about themselves. The MBTI’s categories were born from this mix of observation, imagination, and hope. Each type became a kind of literary archetype, a way to make sense of the infinite variety of human experience.

But Emre’s book also reminds us that the process of self-creation never ends. Just as writers revise their drafts, we are always rewriting our own stories—learning, growing, and sometimes breaking out of the boxes we once inhabited. The MBTI’s enduring appeal lies in its promise of clarity, but its true power may be in the invitation to keep exploring.

So next time you take a personality test, remember: you are both the author and the protagonist. The story is still being written.

References: The Personality Brokers, NY Times, Slate