MBTI and Keirsey should be regarded as separate things. Bob Dylan could be described as an MBTI ISFP (Fi + Se) and a Keirsey INFP.
[MENTION=20005]Noll[/MENTION] —
I'm back again in my cleanup capacity...
I strongly disagree with the perspective that says that the Keirsey ideas that most people are familiar with (from
Please Understand Me and
Please Understand Me II) are a different personality theory that only tangentially corresponds to the MBTI. In
PUM and
PUM II, Keirsey's basically just an MBTI guy who adds the idea that NTs, NFs, SJs and SPs are particularly significant subgroups in terms of what they have in common.
He certainly isn't a believer in the cognitive functions (
aka "type dynamics") but, as further explained
here, Myers wasn't much of a believer in the functions either, and official MBTI sources — not to mention the vast majority of the thousands of MBTI-related studies that have been conducted over the past 50 years — have always been centered around the dichotomies rather than the functions.
Just as Keirsey thought of NT/NF/SJ/SP as the most fundamental way to carve the 16 types into four groups, Myers thought of NT/NF/ST/SF as the most fundamental way to subdivide the 16 types — and Myers' sub-groups are even
less function-related than Keirsey's.
As the back cover blurb for
Please Understand Me (1984) explained:
Keirsey adopted the theory of Psychological Types of Carl Jung and the pioneering (and best selling) method of measuring type of Isabel Myers in 1955 and ever since has adapted his clinical practice to the perspective of Jung-Myers typology. PLEASE UNDERSTAND ME provides a useful vocabulary and phraseology for applying the Jung-Myers concepts of type.
In the first chapter of
Please Understand Me II (1998), Keirsey describes "The Debt to Isabel Myers," and here's part of what he says:
Keirsey said:
I must comment about the way the work of Isabel Myers struck me when I first encountered it in 1956. I remember vividly, even after forty or so years, when a visiting psychologist from Educational Testing Service handed me my psychological type portrait upon my completion of the Myers-Briggs questionnaire. ...
Wow! Here I was, only five years out of graduate school, working as a corrective interventionist for schools and trying very hard to figure out how to apply what I had learned about people in making myself useful to school children and their parents and teachers and administrators, these people having all sorts of difficulties getting along with each other. And along comes a little old lady from Princeton, New Jersey, Isabel Myers, to tell me about myself, about who I was and what I was good for. Oh, I already knew some of that stuff about myself, but I didn't know that I was a kind of type of person, and that there had to be others just like me. Indeed, looking back on my graduate studies I realized that my two best friends in the psychology department were just like me, and the one professor I admired was just like me. ...
I also understood for the first time why I felt so different from everybody else. ...
Myers must have accomplished her feat of developing Jung's distinctions into sixteen type portraits by dint of considerable observation of people in action, as well as a great deal of imaginative speculation. Salvaging the useful parts of Jung's cumbersome and self-contradictory theory of psychological types and making it available to scientist and layman alike was quite a feat. So the debt owed Isabel Myers by students of human conduct is truly enormous.
Had she not devised her personality inventory and its accompanying portraits of personality, I for one ... would not have been able to connect her portraits to earlier ones. For I was later to find that the four groups of personality types described by Myers corresponded nicely with the four personality types of several predecessors.
The "Keirsey Temperament Sorter" at the front of
PUM II types you based on 70 items. Ten of them are I/E items, and 20 each are S/N, T/F and J/P items, and they're very similar to the items on the official MBTI. The official MBTI S/N items include...
- Which word appeals to you most — (N) possibilities or (S) certainties?
- Do you usually get along better with (N) imaginative people or (S) realistic people?
- In reading for pleasure, do you (N) enjoy odd or original ways of saying things or (S) like writers to say exactly what they mean?
- Would you rather be considered (S) a practical person or (N) an ingenious person?
... and Keirsey's S/N items include...
- Are you more interested in (S) what is actual or (N) what is possible?
- Do you tend to be more (S) factual than speculative or (N) speculative than factual?
- Do you like writers who (S) say what they mean or (N) use metaphors and symbolism?
- Do you prize in yourself (S) a strong hold on reality or (N) a vivid imagination?
The idea that, as Infinite Bubble put it, "Bob Dylan could be described as an MBTI ISFP (Fi + Se) and a Keirsey INFP" is, not to put too fine a point on it, just silly — assuming that, by "MBTI ISFP," you're referring to somebody who's likely to come out "S" on the official MBTI.
And both
PUM and
PUM II include separate portraits of each of the 16 types, in addition to descriptions of the things that (as Keirsey sees it) NTs, NFs, SJs and SPs tend to have in common, and, not surprisingly, Keirsey's INFP portrait basically matches MBTI INFP portraits and Keirsey's ISFP portrait basically matches MBTI ISFP portraits — as you already know if you've looked at the Keirsey and MBTI portraits in those link roundups I gave you.
As a side note, and because it's another misunderstanding about Keirsey I sometimes encounter in internet forum posts: The idea that Keirsey's focus is somehow more
behavioral than Myers or other MBTI sources also doesn't have much truth to it. In the introduction to
Please Understand Me II, as part of his explanation for why he steers clear of the cognitive functions, Keirsey himself states (more misleadingly than accurately) that his work is somehow more solidly based on observation of what people actually say and do — rather than on "speculation" about "people's mental make-up." But if you actually read
Please Understand Me II and compare Keirsey's descriptions with the descriptions in Myers, Thomson or any other popular MBTI source (or Jung, for that matter), you'll find that the mix of internal and external really isn't all that different. Here's a passage from Keirsey's INTJ description, for example:
Keirsey said:
Their point of view is pragmatic, skeptical, relativistic, focused on spatial intersections and intervals of time. They base their self-image on being ingenious, autonomous, and resolute. They would if possible be calm, they trust reason, are hungry for achievement, seek knowledge, prize deference, and aspire to be wizards of science and technology. Intellectually, they are prone to practice strategy far more than diplomacy, tactics and especially logistics.
Their "point of view," their "self-image," their "trust" in reason and "hunger" for achievement, their "aspiration" to be wizards: this is pretty much all about an INTJ's
internal values/motivations/etc., no? And this is pulled from his introductory summary. Keirsey goes on to discuss each of those internal aspects in greater detail, and has similar discussions of the "self-image" and "aspirations" and etc. of each of the 16 MBTI types.