Дэвид Кирси: Психолог и автор типологии темпераментов

American psychologist

David West Keirsey ('/k//ɜr//z//iː/; August 31, 1921 – July 30, 2013) was an American psychologist, a professor emeritus at California State University, Fullerton, and the author of several books. In his most popular publications, Please Understand Me (1978, co authored by Marilyn Bates) and the revised and expanded second volume Please Understand Me II (1998), he laid out a self assessed personality questionnaire, known as the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, which links human behavioral patterns to four temperaments and sixteen character types. Both volumes of Please Understand Me contain the questionnaire for type evaluation with detailed portraits and a systematic treatment of descriptions of temperament traits and personality characteristics. With a focus on conflict management and cooperation, Keirsey specialized in family and partnership counseling and the coaching of children and adults.

Keirsey was born in Ada, Oklahoma. He moved with his family at the age of two years to Southern California. Drafted by the Army during World War II, he joined the Navy and became a Marine fighter pilot, and served in the Pacific theatre off an aircraft carrier. He earned his bachelor's degree from Pomona College and his master's and doctorate degrees from Claremont Graduate University (then known as Claremont Graduate School). In 1950, he started his career dealing with youth as a counselor at a probation ranch home for delinquent boys. Subsequently, he spent twenty years working in public schools, engaged in corrective interventions intended to help troubled and troublesome children stay out of trouble. Over the next eleven years at California State University, Fullerton, he trained corrective counselors to identify deviant habits of children, parents, and teachers, and to apply techniques aimed at enabling them to abandon such habits.

As a clinical psychologist, Keirsey regarded the prescription of psychotropic stimulants as a treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), where activity or temperament of school children is considered disruptive to classroom proceedings, as not only unnecessary but harmful to these children. He 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". Keirsey asserted that Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) 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. Thus, in his opinion, ADD was a misleading label assigned to children who ignored the teacher while bothering nobody, unlike the children who are actually disruptive. Keirsey referred to the practice of medicating children with ADD as "The Great ADD Hoax". His main claim was that children labeled ADHD or ADD, typically, have an SP, or Artisan temperament, meaning concrete in thought and speech, and utilitarian in implementing goals.