Hi everyone. I had it in mind to discuss David Keirsey’s temperament sorter for my letter K post for a while, but when I discussed him with my spouse, my spouse pointed out all sorts of things about Keirsey that make him a rather dubious person. Then again, there’s hardly any topic in this challenge that I haven’t been critical of. So Keirsey it shall be for my title, but I’ll talk about temperaments more broadly.
The first person to describe temperaments was Hippocrates in ancient Greece. He believed that health is based on a balance between the four major bodily fluids and that each person has a dominant personality type based on which fluid is more present. These types are sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic. I looked them up and am definitely a melancholic type.
This idea, though it was used in medicine and psychology for many centuries, was eventually rejected in the mid-1800s. That being said, in anthroposophy and Waldorf/Steiner-based schools, variations are still used.
This brings me to Keirsey. David Keirsey (1921-2013) revised the ancient temperaments and connected them to the Myers-Briggs personality types, which I’ll get to in a few days. He first published his Keirsey Temperament Sorter in his book Please Understand Me (1978). The four Keirsey temperaments are the Artisan, the Guardian, the Idealist and the Rational. I honestly think these names are more positive than the classical ones. At least, I’d rather be called an Idealist than melancholic. That being said, according to Keirsey, the Idealists are not primarily melancholic but hyperesthetic (overly sensitive). Oh, I guess Keirsey didn’t solely think positively of the types.
There’s more controversy associated with Keirsey. At one point, he claimed that ADD/ADHD is a hoax and that children with this diagnosis should not be medicated but instead treated through “logical consequences”. I can understand the idea of not medicating children for a disorder that at this point is still solely diagnosed based on behavior, but I do not agree that the disorder is a hoax.
A Multitude of Musings 