Wits University Press

Summary

The story of the development of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) instrument, as captured by Wright Saunders (1991), states that in 1929 Katharine Briggs read a review of Jung's Psychological Types (Jung, 1923/1971), which at that stage had just been translated into English. She became a Jung enthusiast and spent the next 20 years studying his work and checking his theories against her own observations. She always had a strong and intuitive interest in children. It was this interest in the development and individuality of children, as well as in aspects of effective parenting, that led to her discovery and appreciation of Jung. She became convinced that what Jung had to say was of value to all people in understanding themselves and others.

Katharine shared her convictions with her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, and during World War II (1939–1945) the two women started developing an indicator that would enable people to gain access to their preferred Jungian type. They felt that if people could be placed in jobs which they would find satisfying, and in which they could rely on their gifts, it would not only give them greater work satisfaction but would also contribute to their increased productivity. Neither of these women were psychologists, nor had they even taken a course in psychology, but their own research had convinced them that Jung's theory was sound and practical (Wright Saunders, 1991).

Isabel formulated indicator items, and tried them out on friends and family. This was the beginning of a thorough and lengthy search for appropriate items that would more accurately enable the identification of a true type and the compilation of the Type Indicator (Wright Saunders, 1991). Over the years Isabel worked with large samples in order to validate the Indicator's use, including 15 000 nurses and 5 000 doctors. According to Van der Hoop (1970, cited in De Beer, 1997), a particular contribution that Briggs and Myers made to Jung's theory was the development of the Judging-Perceiving scale. Although Jung had mentioned that he observed differences between individuals relating to this preferred attitude to life, the Myers-Briggs team had to formulate and develop a scale to measure this attitude.

Summary

What should we do with Marxism? For most the answer is simple. Bury it! Mainstream social science has long since bid farewell to Marxism. Talcott Parsons (1967: 135) dismissed Marxism as a theory whose significance was entirely confined to the nineteenth century – a version of nineteenth-century utilitarianism of no relevance to the twentieth century. Ironically enough, he penned these reflections in 1968 in the midst of a major revival of Marxist thought across the globe – a revival that rejected Soviet Marxism as a ruling ideology, a revival that reclaimed Marxism's democratic and prefigurative legacy. The revival did not last long but suffered setbacks as revolutionary hopes were vanquished by repression and dictatorship and then by market fundamentalism. With the final collapse of the Soviet order in 1991, and the simultaneous market transition in China, the gravediggers pronounced Marxism finally dead and bells tolled across the world.

Facing such anti-Marxist euphoria, the last hold-outs often appear dogmatic and anachronistic. Marxists have, indeed, sometimes obliged their enemies by demonstrating their religious fervour in tracts that bear little relation to reality, defending Marxism in its pristine form, revealed in the scriptures of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The disciples that followed Marx and Engels – Lenin, Plekhanov, Trotsky, Bukharin, Luxemburg, Kautsky, Lukács, Gramsci, Fanon, Amin, Mao – were but a gloss on biblical readings of origins. Today's epigones do not place Marx and Engels in their context, as fallible beings whose thought reflected the period in which they lived, but as Christ-like figures and thus the source of eternal truth. In their view the founders can speak no falsehood.

Adopting neither burial nor revelation, a third approach to Marxism has been more measured. Many in the social sciences and beyond have appropriated what they consider salvageable, which might include Marxism's analysis of the creative power of capitalism, the notions of exploitation and class struggle, the idea of primitive accumulation, or even Marxist views of ideology and the state. These neo-Marxists and post-Marxists often combine the ideas of Marx and Marxism with those of other social theorists – Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, Simone de Beauvoir, Catharine MacKinnon and so on.

Summary

The Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ) is a family of personality questionnaires designed to give information on an individual's preferred behaviour on a number of work-related characteristics. The questionnaires were developed by SHL for use in the workplace, and only item content which is directly related to the world of work has been included. The OPQ questionnaires have been designed for a range of applications involving the individual, the team as well as the organisation (SHL, 1999a). The OPQ is particularly appropriate for use with graduate, professional and managerial groups, although the content is applicable to a variety of roles. A number of other OPQ versions have been developed over the years for particular occupational groups, such as the Customer Contact Styles Questionnaire (SHL, 1997) for those in customer service and sales roles and the Work Styles Questionnaire (SHL, 1999b) for use in production and manufacturing. Other, shorter versions of the OPQ were also developed to accommodate those who prefer less detail. These questionnaires provide a summary of an individual's personality based on factor principles, and include a Factor Model with 16 scales and a 6-scale model (Bartram, Brown, Fleck, Inceoglu & Ward, 2006).

The latest model of the OPQ, the OPQ32, has evolved into an international model of personality with 32 dimensions, reflecting the changing nature of work at the beginning of the 21st century. The OPQ32 model of personality breaks personality into three domains – namely, Relationships with People, Thinking Style, and Feelings and Emotions. According to SHL (1999a) the design of the OPQ32 was guided by five criteria: is designed specifically for the world of work; avoids clinical or obscure psychological constructs; is comprehensive in terms of personality scales measured; can be used by human resource professionals and psychologists; and is based on sound psychometric principles.

The OPQ32 consists of 32 scales or dimensions. These are illustrated in Table 20.1. The questionnaire was originally developed in two versions: a normative rating scale version (OPQ32n) and a forced-choice format ipsative scale (OPQ32i). The ipsative scale version (OPQ32i) has now been replaced by a forced-choice format version, using item response theory to generate normative scale scores (OPQ32r).

Summary

WHILE writing this book, the original edition of which was published in 1934, I found it necessary to make several very important decisions regarding it.

In the first place I had to decide whether to arrange my material tribally, or to deal with each type of musical instrument separately from the technological and historical points of view, allowing the tribal aspects to emerge incidentally. I chose the second of these alternatives, my chief reason for doing so being that I wished the work to be, as far as was possible, a complete and comparative study of one particular aspect of the life of our aborigines.

In the second place I had to determine what was the most suitable manner of classifying the various musical instruments. I was, of course, well aware that no universally accepted ‘taxonomy’ of musical instruments existed, though two excellent systems had been evolved in recent years.

But these systems, respectively devised by Gevaert and Mahillon of Brussels (1877) and by Hornbostel and Sachs of Berlin (1914), although eminently scientific, ‘seemed to belong’, as my friend the late Canon Francis W. Galpin put it, ‘rather to natural science than to human artifacts’. For this reason I preferred to retain the age-old simple classification of musical instruments into the three main groups of percussion, wind, and string.

But for the use of those who may wish to relate the instruments described in the present volume to the more scientific system of classification, I quote here the five main ‘Divisions’ as set out by Canon Galpin in the simplest possible terms. They are:

Summary

Why are encounters across difference often so complicated and prone to misunderstanding and painful experience of shame and exclusion? And why, worldwide, is there such violent acting out around difference – persecution of Jews, Christian crusades against Islam, genocide of one tribe by another in Rwanda? Being other, democrat or dictator, Muslim or Christian, poor or rich, black or white, living in the northern or southern hemisphere, gay or straight, married or single, man, woman or child, HIV+ or dying of starvation or healthy, the differences between us proliferate and continue to be marked in public discourse, named, every second, on all public media, and also privately, in our hearts and bones. In the decade since 9/11, notions of justice, national safety and retribution constantly rehearse an us–them divide. Genocides and the use of rape of women and children as a weapon of war erode daily our capacity to believe in a shared humanity, an underlying sameness between us all.

Given this extraordinary world context, it is not remarkable that there has been increasing concern about the ways in which psychoanalytic theory and practice might have been blind to, or perpetuated, prejudice in different ways. Theorising gender and sexuality, race and class, cultural difference and religious or spiritual values in the psychoanalytic space is no longer seen as an ‘extra’ set of variables to be taken into account, but as fundamental to the dialogue with the unconscious. The intersubjective and relational turn in psychoanalysis, embedded as it is in postmodern concepts of fluid and shifting identities, underwritten by powerful social systems, has been helpful in sharpening the focus on identity and difference and their effects on relational transformation. Within the psychoanalytic community broadly, there is a deepening movement towards political engagement (Benjamin, 2009). This involves a number of possible activities, ranging from pro bono consultation in public clinics, support for frontline activists working with disadvantaged and vulnerable groups, and engagement with psychoanalytic theory to ensure that it opens doors and embraces complexity, to taking a public stand against discrimination and the silencing of the disenfranchised, wherever it happens.

Summary

Interest in human figure drawings and their evaluation dates back to the 18th century. Drawings are considered to serve as projective techniques, as they present individuals with an unstructured and ambiguous situation, inviting them to make meaning of these tasks by drawing on their own life experiences. This allows for the exploration of a rich tapestry of material which depicts their inner world, emotions, perceptions, personality, needs and interpretation of reality (Zubin, Eron & Schumer, 1965) which may not be possible through direct communication (Machover, 1949/1980). The use of projective techniques is based on the assumption that the individual is driven by psychological forces blocked from consciousness. Unconscious conflicts are revealed by the projection of the individual's characteristic modes of response, thought processes, impulses, needs and anxieties onto the unstructured projective task. Projection is commonly regarded as the general tendency to externalise aspects of the self (Rabin, 1981).

According to Machover (1949/1980), the human figure drawing can be understood to be the way the individual projects his inner reality of past experience and current moods, tensions and concerns by the symbolism of his body image. This inner reality is the self-concept. The psychoanalytic view holds that there are both conscious and unconscious aspects of the self, and it is the unconscious expression of conflicts, body image, self and the environment as well as sexual identity which is projected in drawings (Furth, 1988; Hammer, 1997; Koppitz, 1968). Kanchan, Khan, Singh, Jahan and Sengar (2010) point out that projection of the self should not be defined in narrow terms, as it includes not only the individual's actual self but also the ideal self and the feared self. The theoretical concepts that underlie projective assessment are discussed more fully in chapter 24 of this volume.

Despite the ongoing controversy surrounding projective drawing tests (Matto & Naglieri, 2005; Roback, 1968; Swensen, 1968; Williams, Fall, Eaves & Woods-Groves, 2006), human figure drawings remain among the most widely used psychological tests by clinicians (Camara, Nathan & Puente, 2000). The Draw-A-Person (DAP) Test is rated among the top 10 to 15 most frequently used projective tests abroad (Hojnoski, Morrison, Brown & Matthews, 2006; Yama, 1990) and a similar rating is given for the popularity of the DAP and the Kinetic Family Drawing (KFD) amongst South African practitioners (Foxcroft, Paterson, Le Roux & Herbst, 2004).

Summary

What was new and exciting about this convoy [of ambulances and buses] on May 1st 1948 was that it was conveying non-European patients to their own hospital on its opening day, and for them this was a move from grossly overcrowded conditions at the Non-European Hospital in Johannesburg to a place of quietness and light and, above all, a place where each patient had a bed to sleep on and space to move about freely.

The ‘place of quietness and light’ was Baragwanath Hospital. Ironically, within a few years of its opening the hospital became so overcrowded that few patients had a bed to themselves and there was very little ‘space to move about freely’. Yet the early excitement about the opening of Baragwanath as a civilian hospital for black patients should be seen in the wider context. From the early debates about the establishment of Baragwanath as an Allied military hospital in the early 1940s to its subsequent acquisition by the Transvaal Provincial Administration (TPA), Baragwanath's history was deeply intertwined with arguments about the provision of urban African health care. The story of the birth and death of Baragwanath's first phoenix and its place within the context of urban African health care is important in itself. But the early years also saw the foundation of a specific Baragwanath ethos, for the staff in the early years were those who practised medicine in difficult under-resourced situations – military or civil – and thrived. They developed innovative solutions that they were proud of, and they often stressed the mutual support and assistance created by working in such conditions.

Soweto and its health services, pre-1948

The area today known as Soweto was given its name in 1963 – a composite, coined from the first two letters of each of the words South Western Township. The first of the sub-townships or suburbs was formed in 1905 when the Johannesburg City Council used an outbreak of bubonic plague as a stimulus to clear a Johannesburg slum where Africans and Indians had been living. Over one thousand Africans were moved to Klipspruit. At the same time it became illegal for Africans to live in the city unless they were living in compounds at one of the mines, or working as live-in domestic workers in homes in the white suburbs.

Summary

Theodore Millon (1969; 1991; 1994; 1996b; 2010) argues that predominant theories of personality tend to focus primarily on either the intrapsychic, interpersonal, environmental or biological aspects involved in personality development. Instruments, particularly objective, self-report questionnaires, are then developed in relation to these theories to assess personality. However, personality is more than just intrapsychic or interpersonal factors.

Millon attempts to combine the intrapsychic, cognitive and interpersonal spheres in his theory. He also acknowledges that an integrated approach needs to go beyond psychology if it is to be truly holistic (Millon, 1996b). In keeping with this argument, he borrows from evolutionary biology to develop his biopsychosocial evolutionary theory of personality, which underpins a number of instruments developed under the Millon umbrella.

The Millon family of instruments consists of pre-adolescent, adolescent, adult and medical patient inventories. The Millon Pre-Adolescent Clinical Inventory (M-PACI) is a comprehensive clinical tool that is designed to quickly and accurately identify psychological problems in children between the ages of 9 and 12. Unlike other instruments that focus on single clinical areas such as depression or anxiety, the M-PACI provides a synthesis of the child's emerging personality style and clinical syndrome, and can assist with early intervention (Millon, 2010). The Millon Adolescent Personality Inventory (MAPI) is a measure that assesses eight personality style dimensions, expressed concerns and behavioural correlates in normal adolescents aged 13 to 18 years (Millon, 2010). The Millon Adolescent Clinical Inventory (MACI) was developed specifically for use in regard to diagnostic assistance, treatment formulation and outcome measure in the clinical setting, and is used primarily for the evaluation of adolescents with difficulties. The MACI supplements the MAPI in providing a more holistic picture of the adolescent's personality type and clinical difficulties that he or she may be experiencing (Millon, 2010).

The Millon Inventories also include the Millon College Counselling Inventory (MCCI), Millon Behavioural Medicine Diagnostic (MBMD) and Personality Adjective Check List (PACL). The MCCI is an assessment tool that can help address students’ concerns and student-specific issues such as depression, stress, anxiety, substance abuse, suicidal ideation, and adjustment and relationship difficulties (Millon, 2010).

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Positioning myself

This chapter is about race, about the space it takes up and the role it plays in the South African post-apartheid psychotherapy room. My thoughts about this have shimmered somewhere just beneath the surface of my consciousness for many years, prompted to the surface intermittently when an issue in my practice or my teaching forced it to do so, to be hastily banished by avoidant discomfort. For the most part, I have been content to adopt the oft-quoted stance that as a psychodynamically oriented clinical psychologist I maintain a neutral position in my work, and if issues of race, racism or racial identity emerge in the transference, I work with them as I would with any other dynamic. I have been loath to interrogate my own racialised self and how that impacts on the consulting environment I offer, and I have been equally reluctant to acknowledge any traces of my own prejudiced and racist positions or thoughts in my countertransference.

My submerged thoughts were shaken to consciousness when I was afforded the opportunity to participate in a post-graduate clinical social work programme at Smith College in Massachusetts, USA. Smith College has a policy of non-racism which is taken very seriously. As such, discussions about race and racism permeate every classroom interaction. At the outset, I adopted a curious but detached observer's position, wondering what I could learn from Americans about racism; what they referred to as ‘the raw nerve of America’. Over the weeks that followed I was struck by the transparency and rawness with which students and faculty of all races engaged around racism, and around its potentially insidious impact on our work as clinicians. I was taken aback by the forcefulness with which students and lecturers invited participation around highly sensitive and emotive issues, and I began to allow myself to engage with an honesty and self-reflectiveness that I had not experienced before. I was aware that as much as the discussions I engaged in were uncomfortable for me, they were still far more comfortable than they would be if I were having them with clinicians and students at home, and therefore far easier to have. I made a decision then that, on returning to South Africa, I would intentionally begin to engage myself and others in these discussions.

Summary

One of the most contentious and neglected issues in Marxism is the content, role and place of democracy in transformative visions and practices. For some, Marxism is antithetical to democracy; for others, vanguard democracy represents the pinnacle of Marxism, and still others pay little attention to democracy at all. Marxism has gone through different phases, each phase with its unique social base and foundational ideas. At the time of the Second and Third Internationals, Marxism's social base was largely in working-class movements and parties, but shifted from the 1950s onwards to intellectuals overwhelmingly located in universities. This growth of and engagement with Marxism among intellectuals was in part due to the phenomenal growth and influence of university education (Hobsbawm 2011: 360). After reaching the peak of its influence in the academy during the 1970s, Marxism weakened through the course of the 1990s. In the late 1990s, however, a renewed interest in Marxism emerged among multi-class movements, middle- and working-class activists and intellectuals. These diverse social strata do not necessarily converge in their understandings of history, or their views of the causes and consequences of the dynamics of capitalism, but rather, share in their belief that ‘another world is possible’.

This is the context within which I focus this chapter on literature – both liberal and Marxist – that has explicitly engaged the issue of democracy. Because Marxist influence over the last half-century has largely emanated from intellectuals located within universities, I focus on the various ways in which liberal and Marxist scholars have placed democracy against and within Marxism. While democracy is a contested concept that often incorporates very different notions of social change and control, with various actors and processes, twentiethcentury liberals and Marxists tended to focus on representative and vanguard democracy respectively, largely ignoring the importance of direct and participatory democracy. Bertrand Russell (1946: 14) pithily captured the central distinction: the Western understanding of democracy ‘is that it consists in the rule of the majority; the Russian view is that it consists in the interests of the majority’. Neither tradition emphasised government by the people. The bifurcation of democracy into representative democracy versus vanguard democracy severely limited the debate on democracy in the twentieth century.

Summary

The Occupational Personality Profile (OPPro) was developed by Paltiel and Budd in 1990 and was introduced to South Africa in 1994. Initially the questionnaire did not receive a great deal of attention because users of the Psytech range of tests preferred the Fifteen Factor Questionnaire (15FQ), since the 15FQ was based on a model with which most psychologists had become familiar in the course of their professional training. However, once comparative analyses had been done between the 15FQ and the OPPro, the South Africa distributor felt more comfortable recommending the OPPro for South African use since it was shorter and less expensive to use, and the initial reliability coefficients were better than those of the 15FQ. Users have tended to select the OPPro for large-scale projects, and for respondents who have lower levels of English proficiency or education than those who have completed the 15FQ+. The name of the questionnaire was originally abbreviated as OPP; this was subsequently changed to the abbreviation OPPro.

Rationale for the development of the OPPro

The OPPro was not developed according to a general theory of personality. This does not mean that there is no theoretical basis for the questionnaire, because every individual scale does have a theoretical rationale. The choice of constructs to be included in the OPPro was based on an overview of the research literature in the late 1980s. Dimensions were included if they could be shown to be associated with work performance (Budd, 2009). The goal was to develop a questionnaire that tapped into dimensions that predicted work performance according to the knowledge available at the time. The OPPro scales are summarised in Table 19.1.

Even though the scales were considered on individual merit rather than in relation to a general theory of personality, there is sufficient information in these nine scales to generate a comprehensive report on an individual. Derived estimates of the ‘Big Five’ personality factors are also calculated from the OPPro's scales. In practice the OPPro has proved extremely useful, yielding a remarkably comprehensive description of a person within a short administration time of usually less than half an hour.

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17 - The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® in South Africa

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Part III: 1970–1980

Frontmatter

Chapter 2 - Marxism after Polanyi

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20 - The Occupational Personality Questionnaire

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Preface to Second Edition

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Acknowledgements

Index

Acknowledgements

Addenda

Chapter 1 - Naming and otherness: South African intersubjective psychoanalytic psychotherapy and the negotiation of racialised histories

Summary

Section One - Cognitive tests: conceptual and practical applications

Epigraph

26 - Projective assessment using the Draw-A-Person Test and Kinetic Family Drawing in South Africa

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2 - From Allied Military Hospital to Urban African Hospital

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21 - The Millon Inventories in South Africa

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Chapter 2 - Raising the colour bar: Exploring issues of race, racism and racialised identities in the South African therapeutic context

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Contents

Chapter 1 - Marxism and Democracy: Liberal, Vanguard or Direct?

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19 - Using the Occupational Personality Profile in South Africa

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