The Four Temperments: How to Achieve Love, Health, and Happiness by Understanding Yourself and the People Around You

For therapist Williams (Beating the Blues), the ancient Greek classification of people according to four temperaments--choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic--has contemporary relevance. Both in her personal life and in her professional work, she subscribes to a theory that understanding of oneself and of others is achieved through identification of temperament. Cautioning against the danger of stereotyping people and stressing that rarely is an individual solely of one temperament, Williams familiarizes readers with various permutations and stages of development of the temperaments. This explication of personality, coupled with self-assessment questionnaires, may provide useful tools for the practice of ""treating people according to their temperament,"" but the claim of the subtitle seems an overstatement. (July)