David Keirsey

Dr. David West Keirsey (* August 31 1921 in Oklahoma) is an internationally renowned psychologist, a professor emeritus at California State University, Fullerton, and the author of several books. In his most popular publications Please Understand Me (1984) (co-authored by Marilyn Bates), and the revised and expanded second volume Please Understand Me II (1998) he lays out a system of personality classification known as the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, which links human behavior to 4 temperaments and 16 types. Both volumes of Please Understand Me contain a questionnaire for type evaluation and detailed descriptions of temperament traits and personality characteristics. Dr. Keirsey specialized in family and partnership counseling, coaching minors and adults with a focus on conflict management and cooperation.

Education and professional experience
Keirsey earned his B.A. from Pomona College, and his M.A., and Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University. He started his career dealing with youthful mischief in 1950 as a counselor at a probation ranch home for delinquent boys. Since then he spent 20 years working in public schools doing corrective intervention to help troubled and troublesome children stay out of trouble,followed by 11 years at California State University, Fullerton where he trained corrective counselors in the technology of 1) identifying the deviant habits of school children, their parents, and their teachers, and 2) getting them to abandon their deviant habits.

Development of Keirsey's temperaments
Keirsey's work can be traced back to the father of medicine Hippocrates and to 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 Wheeler, Erich Fromm, Alfred Adler, Rudolf Dreikurs, Milton Erickson, and Erving Goffman.

Isabel Myers was the first to define the 16 personality types now used by Keirsey and many other researchers and practitioners. Keirsey offers different definitions of the types, based on his studies of the five behavioral sciences (anthropology, biology, ethology, psychology, sociology. While Myers writes mostly about the Jungian "psychological functions"--thinking, feeling, intuiting, and sensing, which are covert "mental processes," Keirsey writes mostly about how persons use words in sending messages and use tools in getting things done, which are not covert processess but overt actions.

While Keirsey's main strength may be his accuracy regarding differences in overt behavior, perhaps his most important contribution was his replacing Myers' Jungian model of eight "function types" with Ernst Kretschmer's model of four "temperament types." Thus Myers wrote that four pairs of "introverts" are alike, and that four pairs of "extraverts" are alike. Thus Myers wrote that 1) INTPs and ISTPs are alike; 2) INFJs and INTJs are alike; 3) INFPs and ISFPs are alike; 4) ISTJs and ISFJs are alike; 5) ENFJs and ESFJs are alike; 6) ENTJs and ESTJs are alike; 7) ENFPs and ENTPs are alike; 8) ESFPs and ESTPs are alike. None of these pairings made sense to Keirsey, so he, going with Kretschmer's Hyeresthetics, Anesthetics, Melancholics, and Hypomanics, said the four "NFs" were Hyperesthetic (oversensitive), the four "NTs" were Anesthetic (insensitive),the four "SJs" were melancholic (depressive), and the four "SPs" were hypomanic (excitable). At the time (mid-50s) 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. Thus Keirsey discarded the Jungian function model and replaced it with Kretschmer's temperament model.

AD(H)D controversy
This stance regarding ADHD has lead Keirsey to count himself among the minority of clinical psychologists who believe that giving stimulants to school boys who are so active that they disrupt classroom proceedings was not only unnecessary but harmful to these boys. Consequently he acts as an ardent critic against what he sees as an "epidemic abuse of children", and claims to be successful in the management of such children by applying what he calls the "method of logical consequences" (see "Abuse it - Lose it" at ). He further claims that Attention Deficit Disorder 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, ADHD was a phoney label pasted onto kids who ignore the teacher while bothering nobody, as do disruptive kids. Since giving them stimulants made no sense, Keirsey refers to the current therapeutical practice of drugging inactive kids as "The Great ADD Hoax". Several of his claims such as "make no mistake about the power of Ritalin to disable and eventually shrink the brain", while valid to a certain point, are exaggerated and contradict most clinical studies.His main claim is that children with adhd have an "sp" or "Artisan" temperament(concrete in thought and speech and utilitarian in implementing goals) , though it is thought by most other people to resemble those with an "np" preference, particularly intp. Keirsey does acknowledge, however, that those with an NP preference would be subject to frequent misdiagnosis, but the rare rate of NP in the population being insufficient to account for the high rate of adhd diagnosis is most likely the reason for his insistence on SP; the main types in the school school population being SPs and SJs, the SPs are the ones that are going to be diagnosed. (See also the Controversy section in the main ADHD article)