Personality Psychology: Different Drummers

Excerpted from Please Understand Me II by David Keirsey  

The point of this book is that people are different from each other, and that no amount of getting after them is going to change them. Nor is there any reason to change them, because the differences are probably good, not bad.

People are different in fundamental ways. They want different things; they have different motives, purposes, aims, values, needs, drives, impulses, urges. Nothing is more fundamental than that. They believe differently: they think, cognize, conceptualize, perceive, understand, comprehend, and cogitate differently. And of course, manners of acting and emoting, governed as they are by wants and beliefs, follow suit and differ radically among people.

Differences abound and are not at all difficult to see, if one looks. And it is precisely these variations in behavior and attitude that trigger in each of us a common response: Seeing others around us differing from us, we conclude that these differences in individual behavior are but temporary manifestations of madness, badness, stupidity, or sickness. In other words, we rather naturally account for variations in the behavior of others in terms of flaw and afflictions. Our job, at least for those near us, would seem to be to correct these flaws. Our Pygmalion project, then, is to make all those near us just like us.

Fortunately, this project is impossible. To sculpt the other into our own likeness fails before it begins. People can't change form no matter how much and in what manner we require them to. Form is inherent, ingrained, indelible. Ask a snake to swallow itself. Ask a person to change form-think or want differently-and you ask the impossible, for it is the thinking and wanting that is required to change the thinking and wanting. Form cannot be self-changing.

Of course, some change is possible, but it is a twisting and distortion of underlying form. Remove the fangs of a lion and behold a toothless lion, not a domestic cat. Our attempts to change spouse, offspring, or others can result in change, but the result is a scar and not a transformation.

The belief that people are fundamentally alike appears to be a twentieth century notion. Probably the idea is related to the growth of democracy in the Western world. If we are equals then we must be alike. Freud believed we are all driven from within by Eros, and that what seem to be "higher" motives are merely disguised versions of Eros. His colleagues and followers took issue with him, though most retained the idea of singular motivation. Adler (1956) saw us all seeking power (and later social solidarity). Sullivan (1940) took up the later Adlerian theme and put social solidarity as the basic instinctual craving. Finally, the Existentialists-e.g., Fromm (1941)-had us seeking after the Self. Each appealed to instinct as purpose, and each made one instinct primary for everybody.