Personality Types - The Four Temperaments

1: The Four Temperaments

Through most of human history, it has been assumed that people come in four basic personality types, or "temperaments". This was noted by the great Greek physician Hippocrates as long ago as 400BC (2400 years ago!). Hippocrates named the four temperaments "Melancholic, "Sanguine", "Choleric", and "Phlegmatic" (after various human body fluids which he believed influenced personality). Today we call these four temperaments "Guardian", "Artisan", "Idealist", and "Rationalist".

While Hippocrates' body-fluids theory turned out to be a dead end, his observations about human temperament were very accurate indeed. You can see this all around you, in everyone you meet. Some people are fact-oriented (they're "Guardians"). Some people are action-oriented (they're "Artisans"). Some people are ideals-oriented (they're "Idealists"). Some people are theory-oriented (they're "Rationalists"). True, there are some people, especially older people, whose personalities tend to bridge the gap between two or more temperaments; but the vast majority of people do tend to have one particular temperament.

Over the years, several different naming schemes have been proposed for the four temperaments. At least four such schemes are in common use today.

In 1958, psychologist Isabel Myers and her mother Katheryn Briggs wrote a landmark paper titled "Myers-Briggs Type Indicator" (MBTI for short). In this paper, they gave the four temperaments the names SJ, SP, NF, and NT. (There is much more on Myers and Briggs later in this essay.)

Then a few years later, David Keirsey published his best-selling book "Please Understand Me", in which he gave the four temperaments yet another set of names, by attaching a patron Greek God to each temperament: Epimethean, Dionysian, Apollonian, Promethean.

To sum up, and avoid confusion, the following table shows the various common names for the four temperaments: