Why Temperaments Won’t Go Away
I am so often asked for the source of my perspective and advice of personal and professional development and human interaction from those I counsel I think it would be prudent to review the model again here.
I work from the perspective that there are certain foundational needs that every human being experiences. Those needs are the need to receive and give affection; the need to include and be included by others; and the need to control and be controlled by others.
Many of the counseling techniques utilized by psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and behavior specialists are based on these foundational concepts. These same concepts have been standardized and measured for everything from marital computability to career placement.
The odd thing to me is that practitioners of one type of temperament analysis so often decry and denounce practitioners of another type when most are based on the very same seminal philosophies.
The concept of the Temperaments has appeared over and over throughout history from at least 340 B.C. to the present. For centuries the temperaments were categorized into 4 groups based on the different types of body fluids. Many of those are listed in the table below.
All of the following are based on the work of Hipocrates c450 B.C.
and his four ordinal temperament types: Choleric, Phlegmatic,
Sanguine and Melancholic.
Plato c340 B.C. | Artisan Guardian Idealist Rational Aristotle c325 | Hedonic Propietary Ethical Dialectical Galen c190 AD | Sanguine Melancholic Choleric Phlegmatic Paracelsus 1550 | Changeable Industrious Inspired Curious Adickes 1905 | Innovative Traditional Doctrinaire Skeptical Spranger 1914 | Aesthetic Economic Religious Theoretic Kretschmer 1920 | Hypomanic Depressive Hyperesthetic Anesthetic Fromm 1947 | Exploitative Hoarding Receptive Marketing Myers 1958 | Probing Scheduling Friendly Tough-minded
It would an unprecedented phenomenon if at least some of this information was not founded in elementally true concepts.