Please Understand Me

Please Understand Me is a psychology book written by David Keirsey with Marilyn Bates. It was first published in 1978 as Please Understand Me: An Essay on Temperament Styles and reissued in 1984 under its current title. Its aim is to classify human personality into character and temperament types.

The book includes a self-assessed questionnaire, the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, which links behavioural patterns to four temperament types and sixteen character types. Once the reader's type has been identified, the book offers detailed profiles describing its characteristic traits.

Keirsey starts from the notion that people's values differ fundamentally, and draws on several psychologists and psychiatrists, among them Carl Jung, Ernst Kretschmer, Alfred Adler and Erich Adickes. To determine personality type he gives preference to the Myers-Briggs test, from which he takes the four preference pairs that generate the sixteen types. He then groups those types into four temperaments, which he equates with the classical four temperaments.