Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types
by David Keirsey, Marilyn Bates

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Book Reviews of Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types

Book Review: Truly Enlightening
Summary: 5 Stars

This book is life-changing, but most powerfully so for those who are "intuitives" by nature. It is life changing, because it has the power to validate your life experience in a way that no book (for me) before or since has. This, because it says, clearly and unequivocably, "You are right that you felt alienated, isolated, estranged from everyone else. It wasn't because you are weird, but because your way of looking at the world occurs in only a fraction of the population." It will not tell you, "You're right, and everyone else is wrong." It will tell you, "The different ways of looking at things are not just differences of opinion that can be overcome by argument. They go straight to the heart of how we give value to things in the world, and so do not change easily, and then almost only always by violence to the self." I honestly can't say how this book is received by other types, specifically the S-types (who call themselves realists). All I can say is that reading this book took me miles and miles from my original (horrible) home of isolation, inarticulateness and estrangement, and also made it much more possible for me to accept and understand others. A more accurate appreciation of myself and others was, therefore, the first gift of the book. This gift from the book may very well be available for you, whether or not you buy the theory of personality typing, Keirsey and Bates' description of your type, or anything else in the book. It is no accident that almost all of the reviewers are Ns (even the grumpy ones).

Personality type, as described by Keirsey and Bates, amounts to saying "the way in which you perceive the world and assign value or meaning to it". This means that the very language in which we speak carries the weight of our personality type, language being a reflection of personality. For example, an extravert calls himself "out-going"; the introvert calls him "overbearing". An introvert calls herself "reserved"; the extravert calls her "unsociable". The labels arise because of the values encoded in personality; neither are absolutely right or wrong. Realizing this, one can then communicate more effectively, dropping loaded terms and adopting the ones that your listener receives favorably, instead of as an attack. Secretly, the extravert might mean "unsocial" when he refers to the introvert as "reserved", but at least the remark won't spark an argument, and that five dollars he's trying to borrow will actually end up in his hand. My point here is that Keirsey and Bates' book not only says, "Everyone is different", but also gives you the tools to work with and even often overcome that difference. They insist that no one fits each type perfectly, and that the process of individuation is one of differentiation from the type itself; it's not about pigeonholes or sizing people up at a glance. It's about being shown a bridge between differences that otherwise seem uncrossable. It also clues you in to the fact that no spoken word is innocent; each is fraught with the values of the person uttering it. Even if you want to take issue with the specifics of Keirsey and Bates' presentation of personality typing, if you think the whole thing is off-base, it doesn't change the book's value for emphasizing how difference in personality (however you describe it) results in difference in language (however you use it), and how to negotiate around and through that fact.

Summary of Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types

For anyone acquainted with the ubiquitous Myers-Briggs personality test, Please Understand Me will be familiar territory--but gone over with a fine-toothed comb. And for the uninitiated, this book will be a quick introduction to personality typing the Myers-Briggs way--with a Jungian accent. After presenting a brief rundown of 20th-century psychology movements, Keirsey and Bates encourage you to take the 70-question "Keirsey Temperament Sorter," a sort of mini-Myers-Briggs test that places you in 1 of 16 personality types. Like the Myers-Briggs system, this test sorts your personality into groups of extraversion/introversion (E/I), sensation/intuition (S/N), thinking/feeling (T/F), and perceiving/judging (P/J). Unlike the Myers-Briggs system, Please Understand Me also presents four easy-to-remember temperament types--Dionysian (freedom first), Epimethean (wants to be useful), Promethean (desires power), and Apollonian (searches for self)--that underlie the 16 possible personalities identified by the test. The book then delves into a detailed analysis of each type, with sections on mates, children, and leaders. An appendix paints portraits of the 16 possible personality types.

Unless you're already a true personality-typing devotee, this book may seem a little esoteric, especially the somewhat "in" references to psychological theory that few laypeople will be likely to understand. But give it a chance and you may find that you'll begin to understand why you always know where to find Anna Karenina on the shelf (you have an ESTJ husband), why your boss is sarcastic one day and praises your achievements the next (she's an NF), and why knowing the reason that the sun comes up in the same place every day is important to your little one (he's Promethean). You may even find that once you accept quirks and ticks in others, they will understand you a little better, too. --Stefanie Durbin

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