15 Facts About David Keirsey

David West Keirsey was an American psychologist, a professor emeritus at California State University, Fullerton, and the author of several books.

David Keirsey moved with his family at the age of two years to Southern California.

David Keirsey earned his bachelor's degree from Pomona College and his master's and doctorate degrees from Claremont Graduate University.

David Keirsey has written extensively about his model of four temperaments and sixteen role variants.

David Keirsey traced his work back to Hippocrates, Plato and Aristotle.

David Keirsey considered himself the last of the Gestalt psychologists.

David Keirsey recognized these very brief sixteen descriptions as being accurate, mirroring his observations as a school psychologist, and used these descriptions as a basis in a greatly expanded and modified form of his own.

David Keirsey provided his own definitions of the sixteen types, and related them to the four temperaments based on his studies of five behavioral sciences: anthropology, biology, ethology, psychology, and sociology.

David Keirsey performed an in-depth, systematic analysis and synthesis of aspects of personality for temperament, which included the temperament's unique interests, orientation, values, self-image, and social roles.

David Keirsey's theory blended the sixteen Myers-Briggs types with Ernst Kretschmer's model of four "temperament types", which David Keirsey traced back to the classical Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, as well as other ancient writers.

David Keirsey influenced by Kretschmer's types, grouped the types differently, arguing that the four NFs were Hyperesthetic, the four NTs were Anesthetic, the four SJs were Melancholic, and the four SPs were Hypomanic.

At the time, David 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.

David Keirsey was an ardent critic of what he saw as an "epidemic abuse of children", and claimed to be successful in the management of such children by applying what he called the "method of logical consequences".

David Keirsey asserted 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.

David Keirsey referred to the practice of medicating children with ADD as "The Great ADD Hoax".