Choleric temperament (the Rationalist)
David Keirsey reconfigured the typology created by Isabel Briggs Myers to a scheme of four groups of four types that corresponds to the classic four temperaments. In Please Understand Me(1984), he defined Rationalists as having such qualities:
Rationalists want to gain power over nature, to understand, control, predict, and explain realities, to be seen as competent, to have, most of all, capabilities, abilities, capacities, skills, and ingenuity, to be able to do things well under varying circumstances, to constantly improve, to be free from errors, to increase their store of knowledge, to learn as much as they can, to rearrange the environment, either through constructing physical edifices or building institutional systems, to speculate about the possible motivations and thoughts of those they are with, trying to fit their experiences into some system.
The Rationalist strives for power and is afraid of weakness. The Rationalist prefers:
- Authoritativeness
- Capacity
- Competence
- Control
- Status
- Recognition
- Dominance
- Effectiveness
- Energy
- Greatness
- Influence
- Knowledge
- Potency
- Privilege
- Resourcefulness
- Speed
- Strength
- Supremacy
- Talent
- Vitality
- Will power
Areas of interest for Rationalist: architecture, classics, computers & internet, computer games development, engineering, information technology, inventions, management, mathematics, mechanics, new media, paranormal phenomena, philosophy, politics, psychology, research, science, science fiction.
Positive attributes:
action-oriented, adventurous, ambitious, analysing, assertive, autocratic, autonomous, bold, calm, capable, collected, competent, competitive, conceptual, confident, courageous, daring, decisive, demanding, direct, dominant, dynamic, energized, efficient, forceful, generative, independent, ingenious, inventive, leader, logical, objective, opinionated, outspoken, persuasive, positive, powerful, pragmatic, productive, progressive, resourceful, responsible, results-oriented, self-assured, self-reliant, skilled, stubborn, strong-willed, task-oriented, tranquil.
Negative attributes:
aggressive, always right, angry, argumentative, arrogant, bossy, calculating, cold, controlling, critical of others, cruel, cunning, demanding, domineering, doubting, egocentric, frank, harsh, headstrong, hurtful, impatient, impulsive, insensitive, intolerant, manipulative, merciless, nervy, power-oriented, preoccupied, proud, pushy, rash, resistant, sadistic, self-serving, severe, short-tempered, sceptical, stubborn, tactless, tough, tyrannical, unaffectionate, unsympathetic, workaholic.
Promies of the Type
Isaac Asimov, Napoleon Bonaparte, Julius Caesar, Carlos Castaneda, Charles Darwin, Rene Descartes, Albert Einstein, William Faulkner, Sigmund Freud, Bill Gates, Mikhail Gorbachev, George Gurdjieff, Stephen Hawking, Alfred Hitchcock, Saddam Hussein, Franz Kafka, Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick, John Lennon, Doris Lessing, Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, W. Somerset Maugham, Iris Murdoch, Isaac Newton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georgia O’Keefe, Aristotle Onassis, Pablo Picasso, Edgar Allan Poe, Jean Paul Sartre, Joseph Stalin.
Anesthetic Personality Disorder
The Anesthetic Personality results from delighting in power and from being distressed by weakness.
- Cutting coldness
- Passive insensitivity
- Canalization of interest into well-defined autistic directions
- Indifference, or unshakable equilibrium
- Persistance, stubborn wilfulness, pedantry, fanaticism, logical systematism in thought and action