Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence

by David Keirsey

Book Overview

For the past twenty years Keirsey has continued to investigate personality differences, to refine his theory of the four temperaments and to define the facets of character that distinguish one from... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1885705026
• ISBN13: 9781885705020
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Prometheus Nemesis Book Company
• Length: 350 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Very Fun

I bought the Please Understand Me (1), thinking that it really was going to be a part one and two, but instead, this is the one you just want to go for- it's less of a Part 2 and more of a Please Understand Me 2.0, updated and diving even more so into the personalities. I found this all really fun and interesting, and also quite validating! While I won't stop trying to improve myself and be aware of my weaknesses, it was REALLY nice to read that my personality type is just full of ideas and creative enthusiasm with hardly a lick of follow-through; this is something that has haunted me for many, many years and I've always felt lazy and faulted because of my struggle to follow-through with ANYTHING, no matter how much I legitimately want to work on or complete a project! it was just a relieving little nugget for my back pocket, so I can quite berating myself and just come to terms with the fact that I just gotta figure out a way to get myself in gear, and that it's not my fault!!! The big general eye opener I got from this (to piggy back off of my personal-lore, here), was that it really does take all types to make the world go round, and that we all can't be expected to function, organize, and prioritize like anyone else- and that's a GOOD thing!!! Highly recommended for the curious folks, and those who are into psych/sociology. Just neat stuff.

Essential read, if you want to consider yourself educated

Keirsey is sort of the Adam Smith of Social Psychology. Please Understand Me II (different and better than Please Understand Me) synthesizes and draws out what Western Civilization has known since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. All of us possess one of four general and distinct temperaments, and in turn also possess one of four specific and distinct temperaments from within one of the general groups. If such a thing as a "handbook" regarding human nature exists, Keirsey's book is it.Please Understand Me II gives a few chapters of background at the beginning (most importantly, the propensities for tool usage and communication, resulting in a simple 2x2 matrix illustration), and then the next four chapters are devoted to each different general temperament: Artisan, Guardian, Idealist, Rational. The rest of the chapters build on the former, covering Parenting, Childhood, Leadership, inter alia.It's difficult to emphasize how essential this book is to your personal library. The book is very approachable to the interested and intelligent reader (and according to Keirsey, who WOULDN'T that be...), especially considering Keirsey's rigorous treatment of an important and perhaps even previously neglected area of Social Science.The book may seem mostly theoretical to some, but after reading the book you will probably have no choice but apply the theory you learned to your interactions with others. Not only is the book helpful as a guide to observing and "reading" people, it also is an excellent tool for self-understanding (and even includes tests to help you determine your specific type).Excellent resource...fascinating topic...masterful treatment of the subject matter. I wholeheartedly (and thoughtfully, and excitedly, and steadfastly) recommend Please Understand Me II.econ

A reference manual for understanding others

First off, I'm a skeptic, a scientific thinker in the CSICOP mold. I first encountered David Keirsey's writings on the web site, Keirsey dot com, and thought: A classification system that divides people into sixteen "personality types"? Sounds like astrology -- and I count myself among the firm unbelievers. But I was still curious, and the online questionnaires yielded a reasonably accurate description of me, so I bought the book and dove in. I went straight to the profile of my own type (INTP) to see how much of it I could write off as universal generalities. I was stunned. Keirsey hit some crucial nerves. There's one passage especially, about the Rational temperament's perception of time, that described me uncannily and does NOT fit non-Rationals I know. It was like cracking open a fortune cookie and finding my suit measurements. This knocked down my resistance, and I began reading other profiles pertaining to people close to me -- which was easy to do, because each type has its own self-contained section with all the relevant details. Now, many personality types have details in common, and as a result, Keirsey repeats himself a lot. This can be understandably irritating if you're trying to read the book cover-to-cover, but it serves well for skipping around, for quick reference -- which is the book's greatest strength. It's not a narrative, it's a reference. In addition to laying out type and temperament details, Keirsey relates the history of four-element personality theory, starting with the ancients and culminating with Jung, Myers, and Briggs. And he emphasizes the danger of what he calls the "Pygmalion Project," our tendency to interpret others' differences (from ourselves) as faults or misunderstandings to be corrected -- to try to change other people's basic nature, an endeavor which can only cause worse problems. Personally speaking, I've learned from Keirsey to better understand my wife (and vice versa), my mother-in-law, many friends (and I've learned why I chose these friends), my boss...once you get a feel for this stuff, it illuminates all sorts of relationships. The book has chapters on love and marriage, too, highlighting the special dynamics between particular paired types. (More often than not, one's ideal mate is NOT a carbon-copy, but a contrasting type who speaks the same language.) I've learned to ease off from struggling against people's basic ways of thinking, feeling, working, and communicating. Better to learn to speak their language and to understand their motivations, which may be radically different from yours. It makes a big, positive difference. Admittedly, Keirsey is a Rational himself -- logical, unsentimental, about as un-Oprah as you can get -- and he unabashedly writes that way, which can make the text a bit dry and technical at times. (No disrespect to Oprah. I understand and respect her a lot more too, thanks to Keirsey.) But I believe it's worth the effort for anyone to read at least selected parts of

"Please Understand Me II" is Keirsey at his best.

I almost didn't buy this book because I thought it was just a new version of Keirsey and Bates' "Please Understand Me." The appeal of Keirsey and Bates' original work was that it covered much of the information upon which the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is based is a very readable manner. Rather than reading like a psychological treatise, it read like a book written for the general public. I am glad that I bought "Please Understand Me II." It exceeded my expectations. Keirsey's new book is much better than the original Keirsey and Bates book. I had read Keirsey and Bates at a time when I was taking an MBTI qualifying course, and I found it had value to me because it brought the concepts of personality type more alive than the text from the Consulting Psychologists Press. Although we were also using Kroeger and Thyssen's "Type Talk" and "Type Talk at Work," Keirsey gave me an added dimension. I liked it so much that I purchased Stephen Montgomery's "Pygmalion Project: Love and Coercion Among the Types : The Guardian," to get more information.The basic appeal of a book on personality type is to gain a better understanding of ourselves, our "significant others," and people with whom we work. You might go so far as to say that it gives us an insight into what makes people tick. However, the real purpose of the study of personality type for the layman is to develop an understanding of what Isabel Myers called the "gifts differing." Each personality type has certain qualities that are unique. An understanding of those values adds dimension to interpersonal relationships, whether they be relationships within a family, significant others, or within a work group. The strengths of some members of a group add value to that group, compensate for weaknesses of other members, and make the group more effective. Rather than work with Myers and Briggs's 16 psychological types, Keirsey emphasizes the four temperaments which he developed from the scholarship associated with the MBTI. That was the fundamental strength of Keirsey and Bates' original book, and Keirsey advances that construct one step more by including information about certain "intelligences" associated with the temperaments.I found that "Please Understand Me II" is much more than a self-help psychology book. It goes to great lengths beyond the original Keirsey and Bates publication to provide additional depth to the concept of psychological type, both from a historical background establishing the scientific basis for the study of psychological type, but also from the point of view of the scholar in making the study of psychological type much more understandable. I feel that this book has value not just to the general public, but also to students of psychology, personnel and human resources personnel, as well as the clergy and mental health professionals. People who read this book should also read Stephen Montgomery's "Pygmalion Project," Isabel Myers' "Gifts Differing," and

This book can change your life for the better!

After reading Please Understand Me II, I found myself suspending harsh judgment toward others in favor of accepting and understanding why and how habits, behaviors, and preferences differ from mine. My ENTJ type is only 2% of the population and this book not only explains how this type fits in with all the others, but also how to apply this to both dating and leadership. Unlike arbitrary constructions like astrology, you can test and retest this science and find that it works over and over again! If you are concerned with putting people "in a box," keep in mind that the personality inventory accounts for preferences and motivation, not necessarily actions. I found this refreshing after studying a concrete business model that types people according to what they do behaviorally without considering their inherent motivations and preferences. I would highly recommend this to anyone who has ever tested as an intuitive "N", for anyone who wants to understand team dynamics in any environment, and for those of you who feel like your significant other just doesn't understand where you are coming from...

The definitive work on Temperament theory.

Book Review: Please Understand Me II by David Keirsey, Prometheus Nemesis Book Co.. 1998, 350 pg. By Jack Falt Back in 1978 Keirsey and Bates wrote Please Understand Me. It was one of the first books to popularize the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI), and it included "The Keirsey Temperament Sorter" so people could get a sense of what their psychological type was. However, Keirsey and Bates main interest in the MBTI was to use it as a way to determine temperament. They saw that the SP, SJ, NF and NT grouping of types fit the four temperaments that Hippocrates had written about twenty-five hundred years ago. Keirsey had long been interested in the concept of temperament, and while he does discuss the MBTI preferences, both books focus mainly on temperament. Unfortunately, in the first book he labelled the four temperaments with the names of Greek gods, Dionysus, Epimetheus, Apollo and Prometheus. I found these names really difficult to work with when I first read the original book, and had to have a dictionary in my hand to make any sense out of some of the material. In the intervening years Keirsey (Marilyn Bates has since died) renamed them: Artisan for the SP, Guardian for the SJ, Idealist for the NF, and Rational for the NT, which made for easier reading. In the revised edition "The Keirsey Temperament Sorter II" has been updated with some different questions, and this can still be used to determine your type. He has added "The Keirsey FourTypes Sorter" which determines only your temperament. Both of these quizzes are also on his web site: The book discusses in detail the similarities between temperaments and MBTI, and also how they are different. The MBTI bases psychological type on internal mental functioning. Keirsey finds it more useful to stick to what can be observed or people's behaviour: how people use words and tools. Words are either abstract or concrete, and tools are used in a mainly cooperative or utilitarian way. Thus, SPs use mainly concrete words and use tools in a utilitarian way; SJs are concrete and cooperative; NFs are abstract and cooperative; and NTs are abstract and utilitarian. According to Keirsey, temperament determines behaviour. Keirsey devotes a chapter to each temperament, including a description of each of the four psychological types included in that temperament, e.g. Rationals include: INTJ, INTP, ENTP and ENTJ. As would be expected the descriptions focus more on behaviour than on internal thought processes. Each temperament is described in terms of language, intellect, interest, orientation, self- image, values and social role. The book is well set up as it has numerous charts, and while emphasizing a specific temperament, it also shows the corresponding entries for the other three temperaments. Having given a basic description of each temperament, the book then devotes a chapter to the three main areas of life: mating, parenting and leading. In mating styles the Artisan is the Playmate, the Guardia