Five Temperaments - History and The Ancient Four Temperaments

History and The Ancient Four Temperaments

Five Temperament theory has its roots in the ancient four humors theory of the Greek Historian Hippocrates (460-370 BC), who believed certain human behaviors were caused by body fluids (called "humors"): blood (sanguis), bile (cholera or Gk. χολη, kholé) black bile (μελας, melas, "black", + χολη, kholé, "bile"); and phlegm. Next, Galen (131-200 AD) developed the first typology of temperament in his dissertation De Temperamentis, and searched for physiological reasons for different behaviors in humans. In The Canon of Medicine, Avicenna (980-1037) then extended the theory of temperaments to encompass "emotional aspects, mental capacity, moral attitudes, self-awareness, movements and dreams."

This is also related to the classical elements of air, water, earth, and fire; as sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, and choleric, respectively. They made up a matrix of hot/cold and dry/wet taken from the Four Elements. There were also intermediate scales for balance between each pole, yielding a total of nine temperaments. Four were the original humors, and five were balanced in one or both scales.

Nicholas Culpeper (1616–1654) disregarded the idea of fluids as defining human behavior, and Maimonides (1135–1204), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Alfred Adler (1879–1937) and Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) all theorized on the four temperaments and greatly shaped our modern theories of temperament. Hans Eysenck (1916–1997) was one of the first psychologists to analyze personality differences using a psycho-statistical method (factor analysis), and his research led him to believe that temperament is biologically based.