Peter Briggs Myers obituary
Co-owner and developer of the MBTI assessment passes away, aged 91
Peter Briggs Myers, who was instrumental in turning the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment into the worldwide success that it is today, died peacefully on February 17, 2018. He was 91.
Mr. Myers, a Rhodes scholar who held a doctorate in nuclear physics from Oxford, was the son of Clarence Gates Myers and Isabel Briggs Myers. Isabel and her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs, created the MBTI instrument as a practical application of the personality type theory of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, beginning their work in the 1940s.
When Isabel Myers died in 1980, she left the copyright to the MBTI to her son Peter and his then-wife Katharine Downing Myers. At the time of Isabel Myers’s death, the instrument was not yet widely known, although she had worked on its development for more than forty years with support from the Educational Testing Service.
Peter and Katharine spent the next several decades ensuring the scientific rigor and overseeing the continued development of the assessment, along with the publisher CPP, Inc.
Peter and Katharine helped to fund the Center for Applications of Psychological Type (CAPT), in Gainesville, Florida, a non-profit started by Isabel Myers and Mary McCaulley, and it continues to provide research and training in the use of the MBTI. They also established a non-profit organisation, the Myers & Briggs Foundation, that funds research on Type and its application.
Peter helped his mother with her main book on type, ‘Gifts Differing’, when she developed cancer, and became a Murray Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, in the late 1990s.
Peter leaves behind a son and two daughters, three stepchildren, five grandchildren and one great grandchild. He is survived by his partner, Jane “Emma” Mannes.
This is an edited extract from the obituary written by the family of Peter Briggs Myers.