Temperament

Temperament is a congenital trait of a person that determines the degree of emotional irritability and balance of dynamic characteristics of intensity, speed of response, and adaptation to the environment.

   Usually, when we observe a group of  people, we see that one of the people in the group is fast, the other is restrained, the other is quick-tempered, the other is balanced, the other reacts quickly, and the other is slow. From time immemorial, people have been known to have such distinctive features. Therefore, from time immemorial, mankind has tried to distinguish the typical features of the mental nature of different people, to give a typology of their generalized portraits, to reduce the small number of types of temperament. Such a typology was useful in practice, as it could be used to anticipate and take into account the behavior of a person in a particular life situation. These traits, which have historically distinguished people from one another, have been called temperament.

  Temperament is Latin for "mixed, proportionate." The originator of the doctrine of temperament is considered to be the famous ancient Greek physician Hippocrates (BC 460-377). He asserts that people differ in the ratio of 4 main "body liquid": blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. This ratio of " body liquid" was expressed by the Greek word "krasis", which was later replaced by the Greek word temperamentum - "proportionality". Based on the teachings of Hippocrates, another well-known ancient physician, Claudius Galen (c. 130-200), developed a typology of temperaments, which he described in his famous treatise De Temperamentum. According to his teachings, the type of temperament depends on the predominance of one of these juices in the body. These 4 types of temperament are named after these juices: sanguine (Latin sanguius-blood), phlegmatic (Greek phlegma-mucus, sputum), choleric (Greek chole-bile), melancholic (Greek melian chole - black bile).