Kretschemer’s Theory: The Relationship Between Body And Temperament
In the study of personality, explanations focused on traits have not always reigned. At the beginning of the last century, several proposals for somatic explanations began to appear, such as the Kretschemer biotype, which descend from a way of understanding psychology that dates back to the times of Hippocrates.
Below we see Kretschemer’s theory and how it relates different body constitutions to attributes of human temperament.
From the biological theories of personality, the idea is that Human behavior basically depends on physical characteristics of the organism, and not so much in the variables related to the context in which one lives. These theories have their roots in the first steps of medicine typical of the Greek territory, it is normal that their approaches are biologicalist.
This constitutional model, in psychiatry, is represented by Kretschemer. Ernst Kretschemer, a German psychiatrist, was interested in problems of physical constitution and how vegetative and endocrinal mechanisms determine it. He theorized that these had some kind of relationship with the formation of each person’s temperament. Furthermore, he worked to unravel the relationship between a person’s character, his constitution, and psychiatric syndromes.
The fruit of these efforts was reflected in his constitutional model of personality. For Kretschmer, the constitution is made up of all the characteristics with which an individual is born This includes the genotype interacting with the environment to produce a phenotype. This phenotype manifests itself in three ways: constitution, character and temperament. As they are manifestations of the same phenotype, it is theorized that they maintain a close relationship with each other.
Based on clinical observations and anthropometric research, Kretschmer describes a constitutional typology in which he advocates the existence of four main types:
1. Leptosomal
Kretschmer’s theory describes the leptosome as a person with long arms, a high neck and a sunken chin. A kind of Don Quixote both in physique and temperament. The leptosomal person is shy, hypersensitive, eccentric and tends to live in his own fantasy world
2. Picnic
This type is described as a chubby, paunchy person. It has a spherical head and a round face, with a short neck and limbs and short, thick fingers. Returning to the quixotic characteristics of the leptosomal, the picnic would resemble Sancho Panza: warm, outgoing, happy, good by nature practical and down to earth.
3. Athletic
The athletic man has powerful muscles, hard and strong bones, broad shoulders and a narrow waist. He corresponds to a type of physique similar to that of Superman. The temperament of individuals with athletic type It is associated with ruthlessness, emotional coldness and aggressiveness They are highly competitive individuals.
4. Dysplastic
This is the rarest constitutional type. All body proportions are unbalanced and, accordingly, so is his temperament This type, according to Kretschmer’s observations, is associated with endocrine disorders and, very frequently, with severe schizophrenia.
How to interpret this personality classification?
These constitutions are not taxonomic, but must be understood as dimensions. According to Kretschmer, most people have an amalgamation of types, each falling closer to one extreme in one type and further away in another. For this, not all people show a profile that corresponds exactly with one type or another, only that they are more or less close depending on their phenotype.
Following this line, he investigated through experimental methodology what individual differences existed between the different types. Kretschmer tested the variability of characteristics such as sensitivity to color and shape, concept formation or psychomotor speed in different constitutional types.
Criticisms of the Kretschmer model
Naturally, no model is free from criticism and Kretschmer biotypes are no exception It is to be expected that a model that draws directly from ideas as unscientific as the humors of Hippocrates has serious deficiencies in its validity.
On the one hand, Kretschmer’s model falls short of being not very exhaustive in its description It establishes four categories that vaguely and imprecisely describe four stereotypical profiles. These profiles are rigid and immovable, generating two important problems: it leaves unexplained those characteristics that are not described in the model and does not offer a flexible explanation for those cases that do not fit the model.
This is due, in part, to the fact that the sample that Kretschmer used to develop his model were psychiatric patients, mainly schizophrenic, and men. The model, ignoring the problems of internal consistency and coherence, cannot be extrapolated to the general population
On the other hand, although Kretschmer biotypes They constitute an interesting antecedent of a break with psychiatric tradition By considering that normality and illness do not have a clear limit but rather is a matter of degree, it offers an explanation of personality through circular reasoning. Kretschmer does not rigorously substantiate the theory, but rather the theory substantiates itself.
In summary, although Kretschmer’s effort to modernize the relationship between body and personality is laudable and not lacking in scientific spirit, his theory remains a vestige of an outdated way of understanding personality.
