The ancient Greek Hippocrates (he of the Hippocratic Oath which medical doctors take) tells us of 4 Temperaments (called “humors”): Choleric, Melancholic, Sanguine & Phlegmatic, each for a recognizable personality style. Everyone seemed to fit pretty well one or another. It was helpful to understand people, and for millennia educated people learned these 4 categories as a “given.” Paracelsus (16th Century) likened the 4 styles to different animals/ kinds of mythical beings: nymphs, sylphs, gnomes and salamanders. Shakespeare used his knowledge of temperament to good advantage, creating unforgettable characters, precisely since they are typologically accurate. The “melancholy Jacques” was a  Melancholic. The 17th and 18th century English poets, steeped in classical literature, assumed each of us reflected one of the 4 Temperaments.

Then came the age of reason. The Enlightenment, Scientific Rationalism, which of course attracted the naturally scientific Types, the Phlegmatics. The mellow poetical types, also iNtuitive, adapted to the new vocabulary (17th century metaphysical poets used scientific terms to talk of love, lust and theology). But it took some time for them to let go of the basic, practical understanding of human temperament. As science grew in the 18th century, new discoveries shook us to our roots.

Scientific methods were applied to the improvement of man as well as machine. Freudian principles made little use of the “quaint old notions” of temperament. In the “Nature vs Nurture” argument, Nurture carrid the day, perhaps since it was easier to sell services based on a perfectable person model (Be what you’re best suited to be). (As always, truth, in the middle, gets oversimplified out of the picture.)

But Carl Jung, heir-apparent to Freud, split with the master. He had observed basic type differences among his patients and friends. In 1920 he wrote “Psychological Types” and Extraverts  and Introverts became the rage. He identified Thinkers and Feelers, and Sensers and iNtuitives, but these were not so widely popularized.

Earlier (1907), Adickes had written of the 4 Temperaments as Dogmatic, Agnostic, Traditional, and Novative. About the same time as Jung (1920), Spranger and Kretschmer were separately renaming the 4 temperaments they observed.

In the US, two women who were not psychologists made a breakthrough. They dealt daily with normal people, and developed a “well person” instrument to determine Type. Katherine Briggs had been developing a theory of Type, and when she read of Jung’s work, she adopted his terminology and approach. Unfortunately, Jung failed to pursue his excellent work on Type. He did not develop an instrument to identify people’s type.

Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, did. They added the concept of the Judgers and Perceivers (which Jung implied but did not explicitly incorporate) to Jung’s three pairs, and the 4-pair system of sixteen 4-letter types was born. After years of development and testing at Educational Testing Services in Princeton, their instrument was made generally available in 1975, published and promoted by CPP in California.

David Keirsey, a psychologist working with Temperament, read Myers’ work and related her 16 Types effectively to the 4 Temperaments. Most psychologists and psychiatrists have been slow to adopt Type, perhaps because many were Freudians, disapproved of Jung, and could not accept an instrument developed by two brilliant women who were not psychologists.

Career counselors, business people, educators, clergy, the military, and many others have adopted Type with great success because it works.