Comparing Keirsey And Bates's Please Understand Me

111. PI.Is.III111.rsflllll M. Phenomenon
Keirsey and Bates's Please Understand Me, first published in 1978, sold nearly 2 million copies in its first 20 years, becoming a perennial best seller ~ll ov~r ~he world. Advertised only by word of mouth, the book became a favo~te tralmng and counseling guide in many institutions-government, church, buslnes.s-and colleges across the nation adopted it as an auxiliary text in a dozen dIfferent departments. Why? Perhaps it was the user-friendly way that Please Understand Me helped people find their personality style. Perhaps it was the simple accuracy of Keirsey's portraits of temperament and character types. Or perhaps it was the book's essential messag~: that members of families and institutions are
Recognizing these patterns can vastly enrich our sense of who we are, of who others are, and of how much we can learn from one another about the problems of life. No person that 1 know of has studied temperament in action more persistently and more brilliantly than Keirsey, and no one is in a better position to speak to us about it. Keirsey has been "people watching" for almost fifty years, and his interest in temperament as an organizing principle stretches back almost as far. If Please Understand Me was a valuable report on his progress to that time (1978), Please Understand Me II serves to present a report on what he has worked out in the interim twenty years, and also the valuable addition of his ideas about the relationship of temperament to intelligence. 1 have known David for almost thirty years now. During those years 1 have had the pleasure of teaching and writing and learning with him, and the even greater pleasure of arguing with him. Our time together has been filled with logical discourse and theoretical speculation, and, at the same time, good, old-fashioned hair-splitting debate (including the use of devious debate tactics and other trickery
Without his help over the years I would never have finished the revision, given my penchant for continuously revising my revisions. He was even more than helpful, going as he did far beyond editing, by doing much of the composition. And even more than that, he did a tremendous amount of research over the years and in the remotest places. For instance, it was he who detected what Plato and Aristotle had to say about the different roles the four temperaments of Hippocrates played in the social order. And of course his years of research that went into his four volume set, The Pygmalion Project, are embedded throughout Please Understand Me II. Then there was my family, my son and daughters and their spouses, and of course my wife. They were always there to veto my more wayward speculations and to catch me in my many errors of omission and commission. And my former colleagues and students in the counseling department at California State University Fullerton have been of great help in reviewing the many drafts of the revision and in suggesting things that ought to be inserted or deleted. I wish especially to thank and to commend my colleague, psychologist Ray Choiniere, for his monumental study of the temperament of our forty American Presidents. In return for helping me complete my book on madness and