ABOUT THE AUTHOR

An active career of service as an Air Force officer, university instructor, marketing executive and corporate leader, led Bill to appreciate the power and importance of personality type and temperament in personal and professional life.

A founding member of the international Association of Psychological Type (APT), and President of Type & Temperament Inc., and the Type & Archetype Press. Bill is a recognized leader in the field of psychological type and temperament for some 30 years.

In this capacity, Bill presents at regional, national and international conferences and applies his knowledge and experience with Personality Type and Temperament in such areas as:

• Creating Type and Temperament Seminar Kits for Fortune 500 Companies
• Corporate Training in Communication Skills, Sales Effectiveness and Teambuilding
• Personal and Relationship Coaching
• Assisting Fellow Authors with Concept Development, Organization, Editing, Publishing and Distribution
• Presenting Type/Law Oral and Written Materials (Office Management, Case Preparation and Presentation, Jury Selection) to Law School Faculty, Students and Practicing Attorneys

The ancient Greek Hippocrates (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 carried the day, perhaps since it was easier to sell services based on a perfectible 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,
History (cont. at right)

“most appealing of all the books about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® [Personality Type] that are out there.”

4 Key Reasons Why Type Is Important

1. Type will provide practical tools to increase your effectiveness and power in all your interpersonal relations.

2. Its applications go wide and deep, from how you understand yourself, your family and work organization, to your personal style in religion, the kinds of books you like to read (if any), what vacations you prefer. It’s a framework on which you can hang just about everything, and understand it better.
The possibilities are endless.

3. There are over 6000 psychological instruments, many aimed at pathology, some worse than the symptoms. Type is a well-person concept, based on observable normal behavior. Developed over 40 years, used, tested, validated. It’s a logical, objective system that practitioners use every day in government & industry, religious & educational institutions, counseling, career placement, the military.

4. “There seems to be some sort of miraculous component to this concept,” to quote a minister who uses it regularly. “It changes lives. It changed mine. Maybe yours.”

History (cont. from left)
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, and disapproved of Jung. They 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. I’ll say that again: