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David West Keirsey (; August 31, 1921 – July 30, 2013 "My Father, The Greatest, and Of the Greatest Generation", Obituary by his son, David Mark Keirsey, 14 August 2013.) was an American psychologist, a professor emeritus at California State University, Fullerton, and the author of several books. In his most popular publications, Please Understand Me (1978, co-authored by Marilyn Bates) and the revised and expanded second volume Please Understand Me II (1998), he laid out a self-assessed personality test questionnaire, known as the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, which links human behavioral patterns to four temperaments and sixteen character types. Both volumes of Please Understand Me contain the questionnaire for type evaluation with detailed portraits and a systematic treatment of descriptions of temperament traits and personality characteristics. With a focus on conflict management and cooperation, Keirsey specialized in family and partnership counseling and the coaching of children and adults.
Keirsey traced his work back to Hippocrates, Plato and Aristotle. Among his modern influences he counts the works of William James, John Dewey, Ernst Kretschmer, William Sheldon, Jay Haley, Gregory Bateson, Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler, Raymond Holden Wheeler, Erich Fromm, Alfred Adler, Rudolf Dreikurs, Milton Erickson, and Erving Goffman. He considered himself the last of the Gestalt psychologists. "A Turning Point", Annual Tribute, David Mark Keirsey, 31 July 2015.
In 1921, Carl Jung published the book Psychological Types,Jung, Carl Gustav (August 1, 1971). Psychological Types (Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 6). Princeton University Press. . which proposed a concept of psychological types based on introversion versus extraversion, thinking versus feeling as rational functions, sensation versus intuition as irrational functions, and the coexistence of dominant and auxiliary functions. Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs, subsequently extended and codified Jung's ideas into a test for sixteen psychological types, called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. In a two-page chart of "Characteristics of Types in High School" (Myers Briggs Manual, Form E 1958), Isabel Myers described the sixteen types briefly. Keirsey recognized these very brief sixteen descriptions as being accurate, mirroring his observations as a school psychologist, and used these descriptions as a basis in a greatly expanded and modified form of his own. Keirsey's critical innovation was organizing these types into four temperaments and describing "observable behavior" rather than speculation about unobservable thoughts and feelings. Keirsey provided his own definitions of the sixteen types, and related them to the four temperaments based on his studies of five behavioral sciences: anthropology, biology, ethology, psychology, and sociology. While Myers wrote mostly about the Jungian psychological functions, which are mental processes, Keirsey focused more on how people use words in sending messages and use tools in getting things done, which are observable actions. Keirsey performed an in-depth, systematic analysis and synthesis of aspects of personality for temperament, which included the temperament's unique interests, orientation, values, self-image, and social roles.Keirsey, David (1998). Please Understand Me II: Temperament Character Intelligence Prometheus Nemesis Book Company. .
Keirsey's theory blended the sixteen Myers-Briggs types with Ernst Kretschmer's model of four "temperament types", which Keirsey traced back to the classical Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, as well as other ancient writers.
Myers grouped types according to dominant cognitive function,Myers, Isabel Briggs with Peter B. Myers (1995). 089106074X, Davies-Black Publishing. 089106074X as follows:
Keirsey, however, influenced by Ernst Kretschmer's types (Hyperesthetics, Anesthetics, Melancholics, and Hypomanics), grouped the types differently, arguing that the four NFs (iNtuitive/Feeling types) were Hyperesthetic (oversensitive), the four NTs (iNtuitive/Thinking) were Anesthetic (insensitive), the four SJs (Sensing/Judging) were Melancholic (depressive), and the four SPs (Sensing/Perceiving) were Hypomanic (excitable). At the time (mid-1950s), Keirsey was mainly interested in the relationship between temperament and abnormal behavior, finding that Ernst Kretschmer and his disciple William Sheldon were the only ones who wrote about this relationship.
Keirsey asserted that Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) was an altogether different matter, in that these children were inactive and paid no attention to the teacher's agenda, and that ADD was defined exclusively by stating what they do not do, and in no way defined their observable behavior. Thus, in his opinion, ADD was a misleading label assigned to children who ignored the teacher while bothering nobody, unlike the children who are actually disruptive. Keirsey referred to the practice of medicating children with ADD as "The Great ADD Hoax". His main claim was that children labeled ADHD or ADD, typically, have an SP, or Artisan temperament, meaning concrete in thought and speech, and utilitarian in implementing goals.
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