Please Understand Me II: Temperment, Character, Intelligence [Paperback]

As an NT, I am particularly irritated by this because I am not happy in the hard sciences, which I tried and found I did not like. According to this theory, I "should" thrive there, but I'm not interested. I'm tired of NT's being described as though we all were engineers, scientists, or "techies."

And that's just the example of nonapplication of the theory I'm familiar with from my own life.

I found that in this book, lip service is given to individual differences, but actually each type is portrayed in relatively simplistic, cookie-cutter fashion. People are more complicated than this and there are many traits that are not adequately explained by this theory. Compassion is one, and a sense of humor is another.

This book is interesting in that it explains quite a bit about people, but it can be abused. I found it did not adequately account for factors such as recall bias, in which people can recollect events from their past very differently depending on how they understand their lives today.

The strengths of this approach are that it gives permission for people to differ, and it describes people with enough detail so that readers can see themselves reflected here and get to know themselves well enough to understand why they do what they do.

But as with all psychological theories of human behavior, it oversimplifies as much as it illuminates and if any other reader finds, as I have done, that he or she bases behavior on what "should" be done because he "is" a certain type, the theory has been taken too far in my opinion.

Legions of books have been written about the fundamental function of human minds. So why this one, you ask? Because it is dead-on and has something for everyone. Keirsey combines the cutting-edge research of Myers and Briggs with the time-tested philosophy that people's personality falls into one of four basic groups: the Guardians, the Artisans, the Idealists, and the Rationals. He then goes on to describe the basic worldviews of the four temperaments. They are astonishingly accurate. You will often experiences sheer exhilaration when you let this book show you who you really are. The feeling of having words given to aspects of your personality that you already knew but could not tangibly state, is indescribable. But this is only the beginning. You will find the answers to an incredible array of life's dilemmas compacted in this marvel of literature:

--So many personality differences and stereotypes between men and women are summarized in one page of this one book, in the form of the Thinking/Feeling preference.
--Extending on this thought, gone are the ways of attempting to stereotype people based on race, religion, or sex. Now we have the tools to type people according to who they really are. This book is applicable in any culture and any time.
--Many other mysteries of life will be answered. For example, why does your boss seem so insistent on being the BOSS as opposed to simply hearing out a logical point-of-view? (Hint: Guardians and Rationals are opposites.) Or why, those of you who believe that the spirit is good and the flesh is evil, do so many people sell out to fleshy desires? (Hint: Artisans and Idealists are opposites.) Or why do some of your subordinates at work demand an answer for every single explanation you make and act downright anti-establishment in the process? (See hint #1.)
--The chapter on childhood and parenting alone is worth the price of the entire book. So much family dysfunctionality would be healed if parents would understand its principles.
--Finally, we have a guide to choosing a mate that works! This section is also, by itself, worth the entire price of the book.

The lone weakness of this book is that Keirsey, a Rational, allowed substantial personal bias into his work. This partiality is especially notable in the section on mating, where he goes to great lengths to defend the weaknesses of a Rational's style of romance. The irony is that Rationals are, according to Keirsey, the most impartial and the most self-critical of the styles. Why he failed to apply himself here is unclear.

Simply put, this glitch reduces the book from six stars to five. Take the bias tongue-in-cheek and buy this book. Now. And make its message a staple of your life. Hint: it is so powerful that you probably won't have to try. It will set in on its own and give you freedom in dealing with people as you have probably never had before.