Beyond MBTI — Temperaments

Four humours, twelve arrangements, one engine

This is the oldest, the most popular and the flimsiest model on the whole site. It says nothing about how you think — the Ni · Te · Fi · Se stack is identical across all twelve blends below. What it describes is the temperature of that stack: how fast it starts, how hard it treats people, and how long it takes to shut down.

A melancholic–phlegmatic INTJ and a choleric–sanguine INTJ run exactly the same cognitive engine and are, to live with, two different species. One takes three months to say what he concluded on the first day; the other says it before he has finished concluding. Neither is more of an INTJ than the other, and that is why this vocabulary survives: it names the one thing MBTI deliberately does not measure — the tempo, not the architecture.

None of this has any standing in contemporary psychology. No instrument in scientific personality psychology measures “choleric”; nobody has ever found black bile. The four humours are pre-scientific vocabulary and they are here as descriptive language only — much as one calls a person cold-blooded without making any claim about the temperature of their blood. Two confusions need clearing before you read on. The first: the twelve dominant/secondary blends do not come from antiquity, they come from Tim LaHaye, in 1984. The second, and the more serious: do not confuse any of this with Keirsey’s temperaments. In Please Understand Me II (1998), Keirsey named four groups — Artisan (SP), Guardian (SJ), Idealist (NF) and Rational (NT) — and every type belongs to exactly one of them, by definition. The INTJ is always Rational: no dominant, no secondary, no blending possible. It is a different model, by a different author, on a different logic, which merely borrowed the word “temperament”. And the warning Pittenger addressed to the MBTI applies twice over here: the more generic the description, the truer it feels to whoever recognises themselves in it.

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The four humours, on their own

Melancholic

The humour that most resembles the type’s default behaviour — which is exactly why it misleads. In an INTJ the melancholic does not add depth: it adds demand. Ni already converged on its own towards a single reading of the future; the melancholic insists that reading be immaculate before it becomes a spoken sentence. Hence the long interval between knowing and acting, the self-criticism working a full shift, and the habit of treating error as a moral failure rather than as information. Beware the shortcut: an INTJ is not melancholic by definition, and much of what gets described here as temperament is introverted intuition seen from outside.

Choleric

In an INTJ, choleric is Te at full volume. It shortens the distance between Ni’s conclusion and the order given — what would look like impulsiveness in another type appears here as an unappealable decision taken too fast to be explained. It brings initiative, an appetite for responsibility and an almost physical intolerance of incompetence, slowness and meetings. It brings the classic cost too: people handled as variables inside the plan, and the certainty that disagreement is delay.

Phlegmatic

Low reactivity. In an INTJ that means Ni running without agitation and Te operating without urgency: the type that looks unshakeable because, most of the time, it genuinely is. The calm is real and it is not repression — and that is precisely the trap. The phlegmatic does not reduce what Fi registers; it only removes the impulse to say it. Offences are filed whole, with a date, never surfacing, until the day the bill is presented closed and with no right of appeal.

Sanguine

The rarest of the four in an INTJ, and the most destabilising — because it lends the type precisely what the stack does not supply: presence, appetite for the present, ease with strangers. It reaches the inferior function. Se, normally a blind spot, acquires a voice: the body shows up, the now shows up, excess shows up. This is the INTJ who tests as ENTP or ENFP and spends years doubting his own type — without noticing that the engine has not changed, only the temperature it runs at.

The real chronology

Twenty-four centuries, three different models sharing one name

The origin is medical, not psychological. De natura hominis, from the Hippocratic corpus, written around 400 BC and probably by Polybus of Cos, holds that the body contains blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, and that health is the balance between them. Nobody in that text is a melancholic. Someone has, at a given moment and because of a given season, too much black bile — and later has less. Character typology is a later reading, laid over a text about physiology.

It is Galen, around 170 AD, who turns that into a doctrine of mixtures. And this is where the popular legend collapses: Galen’s mixtures number nine, not four. One well-tempered, four simple and four compound, along the hot/cold and dry/wet axes. The tidy table of four types with a dominant and a secondary that circulates today on corporate training posters exists nowhere in Galen. It was assembled much later, by other people, for other purposes.

The prestige of the word “melancholic” has a date and authors too. Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl reconstructed in 1964 how melancholy migrated from a disease of black bile to the badge of genius — from the Aristotelian problem of why exceptional men are melancholic, through Ficino, to Dürer’s Melencolia I. Keep that in mind as you read the panels below: if the label “melancholic” feels like a compliment — depth, seriousness, gift — what you are feeling is the effect of a Renaissance literary rehabilitation, not the outcome of a measurement.

Medicine dropped the mechanism in 1858. Virchow’s cellular pathology located disease in the cell, and from then on the humours explained nothing about the body at all. What survived was the vocabulary — four useful adjectives, orphaned from the physiology that once justified them.

When psychology came back to the subject, it came back through dimensions. Wundt, as early as 1874, reorganised the four old names on two continuous axes: the strength of the emotion and the speed at which it changes. Eysenck and Eysenck, in 1985, used the same four names as quadrant labels on extraversion × neuroticism — a mnemonic borrowed over measured dimensions, not a return of the humours. In neither case are there types.

The twelve blends on this page date from 1984. Tim LaHaye, a Baptist pastor and author of Christian popular psychology, published in Why You Act the Way You Do the dominant/secondary pairs now presented as ancient wisdom; Florence Littauer, the year before, had popularised the four types in the same publishing world. This matters and it is not a footnote: the structure organising this page is four decades old, not twenty-four centuries.

Something did survive into contemporary research — but not the types. Kagan called his 1994 book Galen’s Prophecy as a historical courtesy; its content is the longitudinal observation of inhibited and uninhibited children, measured by reactivity. Rothbart, in 2011, defines temperament as early differences in reactivity and self-regulation, dimensional and observable from the first months of life. That is the grain of truth under the phrase “choleric–phlegmatic”: how quickly you fire and how quickly you return to rest are real individual differences, early and reasonably stable. They are simply two continuous lines, not four boxes with a secondary slot.

  • c. 400 BC — De natura hominis describes four humours as the physiology of health and disease. No typology of character.
  • c. 170 AD — Galen organises the mixtures of hot/cold and dry/wet: nine of them, not four, and with no notion of a dominant and a secondary.
  • 14th–16th centuries — melancholy is rehabilitated as the mark of genius. The prestige of the word comes from that literature, not from medicine.
  • 1858 — Virchow’s cellular pathology locates disease in the cell and retires the humours as a mechanism.
  • 1874 — Wundt reorganises the four names on two continuous axes: strength of emotion and speed of change.
  • 1983–1984 — Littauer popularises the four types and LaHaye publishes the twelve dominant/secondary blends reproduced on this page.
  • 1985 — Eysenck and Eysenck use the old names as quadrant labels over extraversion × neuroticism. Borrowed names, not humours.
  • 1994–2011 — Kagan and Rothbart measure reactivity and self-regulation from infancy. Rothbart works in continuous dimensions; Kagan argues for categories (inhibited and uninhibited). Neither works in blended humours.

The twelve blends, dominant first

The relentless perfectionist

Plans for months, then moves without a second’s hesitation.

In an INTJ

The order matters more than the ingredients. With the melancholic in front, the standard is set before any movement: Ni converges, the melancholic raises the bar, and nothing happens until the solution is internally sound. Only then is the choleric secondary switched on — and at that point there is no deliberation left, because the whole of it already happened in silence. This is the INTJ who spends half a year reading, drafting and discarding, and then on some ordinary Saturday executes in eight hours what others would take weeks to begin.

The strength of this pairing is its hit rate: when this INTJ finally moves, he is usually right, because the cost of being wrong was paid in advance. The weakness is that the choleric secondary has no idea how to reopen anything. The plan is long, expensive and private, and reconsidering it in public would amount to admitting that the melancholic failed at the one thing it believes it can do. Add tertiary Fi, which treats a standard as a value, and error stops being data and becomes a moral debt.

At work

Excellent on long projects with a defined deliverable — systems architecture, applied research, anything where a design phase is legitimate. Poor in moving-requirement environments, where the bar shifts every week and preparation time is never granted.

Risk

Self-criticism with interest. The standard was calibrated by Ni without contact with the world, and the choleric secondary enforces it on you before it enforces it on anyone else. Late rigidity, too: changing course after six months of investment feels like betraying your own judgement.

Sources

Not every claim about type carries the same weight. The tag beside each work says where it comes from — and what counts as evidence varies a great deal between them.

  1. Academic psychology Eysenck, H. J., & Eysenck, M. W. (1985). Personality and Individual Differences: A Natural Science ApproachPlenum Press.
  2. Academic psychology Kagan, J. (1994). Galen’s Prophecy: Temperament in Human NatureBasic Books.
  3. Academic psychology Rothbart, M. K. (2011). Becoming Who We Are: Temperament and Personality in DevelopmentGuilford Press.
  4. Academic psychology Virchow, R. (1858). Die Cellularpathologie in ihrer Begründung auf physiologische und pathologische GewebelehreAugust Hirschwald.
  5. Academic psychology Wundt, W. (1874). Grundzüge der physiologischen PsychologieWilhelm Engelmann.
  6. Methodological critique Pittenger, D. J. (2005). Cautionary comments regarding the Myers-Briggs Type IndicatorConsulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 57(3), 210–221.
  7. Specific model Keirsey, D. (1998). Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, IntelligencePrometheus Nemesis.
  8. Specific model LaHaye, T. (1984). Why You Act the Way You DoTyndale House. Publicado em 1984 como Your Temperament: Discover Its Potential e retitulado na edição Living Books (1988). As doze combinações dominante/secundário.
  9. Specific model Littauer, F. (1983). Personality PlusFleming H. Revell.
  10. Antiquity Galeno (c. 170 d.C.). Mixtures (De temperamentis)Em Galen: Works on Human Nature, vol. 1, ed. e trad. P. N. Singer & P. J. van der Eijk, com P. Tassinari, Cambridge Galen Translations, CUP, 2018. Nove misturas.
  11. Antiquity Hipócrates (atrib. Pólibo de Cós) (c. 400 a.C.). De natura hominisCorpus Hippocraticum; Loeb Classical Library IV, Harvard UP, 1931.
  12. Antiquity Klibansky, R., Panofsky, E., & Saxl, F. (1964). Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and ArtThomas Nelson (Londres) / Basic Books (Nova York); ed. aumentada, org. P. Despoix & G. Leroux, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019 — não é reimpressão, e a paginação não corresponde.