David Keirsey

Dr. David West Keirsey is an internationally renowned psychologist, a professor at California State University, Fullerton, and the author of several books, the best-known of which is Please Understand Me, co-written with Marilyn Bates. The best seller, in which he describes a system of personality classification known as the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, sold nearly 2 million copies in its first 20 years, and more recently has been revised and expanded as Please Understand Me II. Keirsey specializes in coaching children, parents, and spouses to decrease conflict and to increase cooperation.

Dr. Keirsey earned his B.A. from Pomona College, and his M.A., and Ph.D. from Claremont College Graduate School. Keirsey began dealing with youthful mischief in 1950 as a counselor at a reform school for delinquent boys. He spent nearly 20 years working in public schools as a 'corrective interventionist', followed by 11 years at CSU Fullerton training therapists and pathologists in the art of changing dysfunctional behavior in children and adults.

Both versions of Please Understand Me contain the Keirsey Temperament Sorter questionaire and detailed descriptions of temperament traits and personality characteristics. Keirsey's descriptions of temperament are based on his life long study of people and psychology. Although Keirsey's work follows thousands of years of archetype theory traced as far back as Hippocrates, Keirsey cites among his modern influences the works of Ernest Kretschmer, Isabel Myers, Jay Haley, Gregory Bateson, Eduard Spranger, Erich Fromm, Alfred Adler, Carl Rogers and Milton Erickson.

Isabel Myers was the first to systematize and define the 16 personality types now used by Keirsey and many other theoreticians and clinical practitioners. Keirsey cites Myers as having an 'idealist' INFP personality type, introverted, intuitive, feeling, and perceiving, and describes himself as a 'rational' INTP type, with thinking rather than feeling traits.

Keirsey has somewhat differing descriptions from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), developed by Myers and her mother Katharine Briggs, but his work largely derives from Myers' system for sorting temperament types. Keirsey attempts to address strictly observable behavior patterns, whereas the MBTI tends toward insights regarding evident thoughts and feelings.

While Keirsey's main strength may be his insightful accuracy regarding temperament types, perhaps his most important theoretical contribution was his variation on the system Myers developed for grouping archetypes, combining intuition with thinking and feeling functions, as NT and NF, rather than as NJ and NP, to determine archetype. Keirsey is also notable for acknowledging the connection between certain traits and vulnerability to sometimes subjectively diagnosed mental disorders. Keirsey recognized that virtually all anorexics had 'idealist' NF traits, and that boys with intuitive and perceiving (N and P) traits are all too frequently mis-diagnosed as having ADHD.

Keirsey counts himself among thousands of psychotherapists in America who believe psychotropic drugging of active children is virtually always unnecessary, and is a vocal critic against the epidemic of iatrogenic child abuse. Keirsey points to his success with alternative interventions, such as the rule of 'logical consequences', and the 'abuse it, lose it' method, to resolve conflicts and to make the healthy upbringing of children possible.

He is currently working on his new book, Temperament and Talent, which examines the complex interaction between our inborn preferences, our natural talents, our developed skills, and what we actually practice.

See also

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Anti-psychiatry

External Links

• Keirsey.com – Temperament: Different Drums, Different Drummers
• Keirsey.com – The Great ADHD Hoax
• CAPT.org – The Story of Isabel Briggs Myers