Appreciating Differences - Jack Falt - Ottawa area, Ontario, Canada

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Book Review by Jack Falt, INFJ

Montgomery, Stephen, People Patterns: A Modern Guide to the Four Temperaments
Del mar, CA: Archer Publications, 2002, ISBN 1-885705-03-4, pp 135

This short book is a distillation of Keirsey’s Please Understand Me II (PUM II). It is presented in a very readable form. Montgomery is Keirsey’s son-in-law so we assume he has his father-in-law’s blessing on the contents of the book. The book follows the pattern of PUM II and includes chapters on the basic concepts of temperament, a look at the four temperaments, dating and mating, parent and child, and talent and career. In closes with an abbreviation of each of the sixteen type descriptions that were in PUM II.

I think this is an excellent introduction to temperament and it would be the one to read before diving into the three times as long PUM II.

Montgomery is also the author of The Pygmalion Project Vol. 1, 2 & 3. Each book is devoted to one of the temperaments and illustrate each of the four personality types that make up each temperament by looking at characters from famous literature. (I’m not sure why he has not finished the fourth volume instead of getting sidetracked on this book.) In this book he uses his extensive knowledge of media to give examples of characters from film and TV that exemplify the temperament and types. For the self-discovery chapter he uses The Wizard of Oz characters. For the dating and mating chapter he uses the characters of four women from the TV program called Sex in the City. He describes the four temperaments of children using the four kingdoms of Disneyland and four of its characters. In the careers chapter he uses both Star Trek and Star Wars characters. He also throws in characters from Harry Potter just for fun. These all help us see that temperament is all around us and having the four temperaments in a story is necessary to make it true to life and to make it interesting.

Since the MBTI® Manual has accepted the concept of temperaments and the work of both Keirsey and Berens make it better known, more facilitators are using temperament in their work. Temperament helps us understand needs, motivation and behaviour. The Jung/Myers theory helps us understand how the mental processes work. Keirsey has shown us how valuable temperament theory is, and Berens has put all this into a program called The Self-Discovery Process with the introduction of Interaction Styles to bridge the gap between temperaments and personality types.

Each of the temperaments is well described under a number of heading which make this book an excellent resource for doing a presentation. You can throw up a point on the overhead and then expound a whole paragraph’s worth of additional information.

In the dating and mating chapter the author describes what it may be like to date and/or be married to each of the temperaments. Then he goes on to describe the most frequent combinations of temperaments and what each of the pairings of the ten combinations would be like. It is a little simpler that the Tiegers’ 136 combinations of all the sixteen types. Like the Tiegers, Montgomery doesn’t say that any particular combination is better or worse than any other combination. They are just different.

The parenting chapter describes the four temperaments of children and of their parents. Then it looks at how each temperament parents each of the four children’s temperaments. For both groups, couples and parents, Montgomery cautions against the Pygmalion Project of trying to change our mates or our offspring into carbon copies of ourselves. It doesn’t work and causes a lot of heartache. Even if it did work, we would find that we still would not be satisfied.

In the career chapter in looking at the four temperaments, Montgomery breaks down careers into a number of categories for each temperament and lists over a dozen careers for each category. He looks at the main skills of each temperament and shows the need to follow our bliss if we are to be satisfied in our jobs.

For those of you who are not too knowledgeable about temperament, I think this is an excellent book to start with. I feel that temperament is a valuable component to understanding Jung/Myers theory and even if you don’t use it directly, it is important for you to understand it.

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