In 1917, American personality testing began in earnest with Woodworth’s Personal Data Sheet, an assessment given to soldiers during World War I to identify those who might react negatively to enemy fire. In contemporary times, the rise of psychoanalysis and the belief that an all-knowing shrink can mine your psyche was a strong “cultural prompt” inspiring people toward introspection, says Mitch Green, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut and author of Know Thyself: The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge. The origin of the age-old axiom “know thyself” extends as far back as ancient Greece, after all. We’ve been attempting to make sense of our minds, our personalities, our motivations, for millennia. The quest for self-knowledge is as old as humanity The question of whether we can ever truly know ourselves - and whether the means of obtaining that information from a quiz is legitimate - isn’t as important as what we do with that insight. Self-reflection has its utility, but a test or a rigid personality type may not provide the answers we’re looking for. These assessments and quizzes and identifiers, though, only tell one side of the multidimensional story that is a human life. From Myers-Briggs and Enneagram to love languages and Hogwarts houses, we are sufficiently armed with the means to classify and define ourselves - and with bite-size descriptors in which to broadcast our findings. People have long been motivated to define the inner workings of their minds, but never quite had the wide array of tools or language to clearly communicate who they are until fairly recently. Whenever she mentions her astrological sign or attachment style to other similarly personality-informed conversation partners, “I feel like they understand who I am just by these signifiers,” Hernandez says. She attributes descriptors such as “insecure,” “reliable,” and having an “intense relationship with your mother” to her various personality types. ![]() Just as a medical diagnosis can explain a patient’s symptoms, Hernandez sees personality identifiers as succinct validation for why she is the way she is. Later, she took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Then came Enneagram - a personality test labeling respondents with one of nine types - which predated learning her attachment style at the behest of her therapist. Her path toward inner omniscience first began with a foundation in astrology, which Hernandez says she discovered as a child. Until recently, she considered quality time her love language, but after listening to an episode of the podcast If Books Could Kill, she now thinks love languages are “kind of bullshit.” Juanita Hernandez is a 25-year-old Miami-based anxiously attached Aries (Scorpio moon, Taurus rising), ENFJ, Enneagram Type Two.
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