If you do not want what I want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong.
Or if my beliefs are different from yours, at least pause before you set out to correct them.
Or if my emotion seems less or more intense than yours, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel other than I do.
Or if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, please let me be.
I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up trying to change me into a copy of you.
If you will allow me any of my own wants, or emotions, or beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself to the possibility that some day these ways of mine might not seem so wrong, and might finally appear as right — for me. To put up with me is the first step to understanding me.
Not that you embrace my ways as right for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me for my seeming waywardness. And one day, perhaps, in trying to understand me, you might come to prize my differences, and, far from seeking to change me, might preserve and even cherish those differences.
I may be your spouse, your parent, your offspring, your friend, your colleague. But whatever our relation, this I know: You and I are fundamentally different and both of us have to march to our own drummer.
As in the original Please Understand Me, the point of this updated and expanded edition is that people are different from each other, and that no amount of getting after them is going to change them. Nor is there any reason to change them, because the differences are probably good.
We differ from each other in fundamental ways. We differ in our thoughts, in our feelings, in our wants and beliefs, and in what we say and do. Differences are all around us and are not difficult to see, if we look. Unfortunately, these variations in action and attitude trigger in us an all- too-human response. Seeing others as different from ourselves, we often conclude that these differences are bad in some way, and that people are acting strangely because something is the matter with them.
Thus, we instinctively account for differences in others not as an expression of natural diversity, but in terms of flaw and affliction: others are different because they're sick, or stupid, or bad, or crazy.
And our job, at least with those we care about, is to correct these flaws, much as the mythical sculptor Pygmalion labored to shape his perfect woman in stone. Like Pygmalion, we labor to remake our companions in our own image. After all, are we not ourselves, even with our flaws, the best models for how humans should think, feel, speak, and act? Remember the line in My Fair Lady (based on Shaw's play Pygmalion), when Henry Higgins wonders why Eliza Doolitle can't simply "be like me?"
But our Pygmalion Project cannot succeed. The task of sculpting others into our own likeness fails before it begins. Ask people to change their character, and you ask the impossible. Just as an acorn cannot grow into a pine tree, or a fox change into an owl, so we cannot trade our character for someone else's. Of course we can be pressured by others, but such pressure only binds and twists us. Remove a lion's fangs and behold a still fierce predator, not a docile pussycat. Insist that your child or your spouse be like you, and at best you'll see his or her struggles to comply— but beware of building resentment. Our attempts to reshape others may produce change, but the change is distortion rather than transformation.
[The text goes on to described how Hippocrates and others talked about character and temperament formed at birth. Freud tried to posit a single archtypical motivation to all people, instinctual lust. Jung disagreed and said people were different in essential ways; having a multitude of instincts that drive them. Jung saw a primordial difference in whether people were extroverted or introverted combined with one of "four basic psychological functions" — thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition.]
My Notes by Bill Davis --
While I either disagree with or am not certain about the appropriateness of the psycho- philosophical position or viewpoint articulated by Keirsey in dealing with life's problems or issues or conflicts with others, especially in a team or work or relationship environment, the following text has given me a great deal to reflect upon and learn from — which is for me, fortunately or not, quite an intense, on-going process and activity. So I thought I would pass this on.
My biggest issue in dealing with Keirsey's viewpoint is that it does not account for change and, specifically, does not advocate for change of character when it might be appropriate, or at least when change of certain behaviors would be appropriate. Such changes might be expected, desired or demanded in different circumstances -- and might in fact obtain the goals or satisfy the needs of the different "temperament" types and, therefore, such change would not be inconsistent with any particular temperament type but would enhance or further success at living.
I think, in normal circumstances and when mental illness or social pathology is not present, a balance between self-respect for who one is, or "naturally" is inclined to be, and who one "can be" as a matter of choice and willingness [not should be and coercion] is a more accurate description of the "better" way of being. I also tend to be critical of any theory of human life, being, relationship that posits the "individual" as the fundamental unit without regard for the concept of the "collective" or "unity" of different people; as I think such psychological analytics tend to reify the underlying capitalist materialist individualist basis of our culture without regard to other cultural, social, political, economic and, ultimately, personal value systems and human character potential.
It is kind of like the old argument over whether there is such a thing as altruism. Starting with Immanuel Kant, and continuing through Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Buber and others modern european philosophy has developed a dialectical, existential and spiritualist methodology which does not posit any one answer as absolute to these kinds of reflective issues. Rather much of modern european thinking and the Buddhist philosophical-spiritualist system posit human being as a naturally transcendent, effervescent, becoming -- not a fixed or rigid set of behaviors, attitudes, character traits, etc. So, there, that's my thoughts and here is the text from Keirsey's book.