The Four Temperaments in Anthroposophy

The four temperaments, choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, and melancholic, are the four ways in which the members of the human being can be weighted against one another. In anthroposophy the temperament is not a mood, a personality type, or a humour of the blood. It is the meeting point of two streams that come together in every person: the line of heredity, which gives the physical body its inherited features, and the individuality, the I that comes out of earlier lives and takes hold of this body at birth. The temperament is what these two produce where they meet, and it is the most direct thing a teacher, a parent, or a physician can observe about a person's constitution.

Which member predominates

The human being is fourfold: physical body; etheric body, the life body that carries growth, nourishment, and habit; astral body, the bearer of sensation, feeling, and desire; and the I. In Steiner's lecture on the four temperaments, and again in the Stuttgart teacher-training discussions of 1919, each temperament is the predominance of one of these four.

• Choleric: the I predominates. The person meets the world as something to be overcome, holds a purpose and drives it through, and takes hold of things with force.
• Sanguine: the astral body predominates. Sensation and feeling move from one impression to the next; interest is lively, quick to light, and quick to move on.
• Phlegmatic: the etheric body predominates. Life goes on comfortably in its own rhythm; the inner processes of digestion and well-being outweigh the outer world, and little disturbs the calm.
• Melancholic: the physical body predominates. The person feels the weight and resistance of the body itself; attention turns inward, to what hurts, to what has been suffered, to the burden of things.

Nobody is one temperament alone. Every person carries all four, with one leading and a second colouring it, and the mixture shifts through life.

The bodily signs

Because the temperament is a matter of constitution, it shows in the body. The choleric is often short and compact, with a firm, planted step, as if the heel drove into the ground. The sanguine is slender and light, with a springing walk and eyes that move quickly. The phlegmatic is rounded and comfortable, the gait slow and even. The melancholic tends to be tall, thin, and slightly bowed, the head inclined, the walk heavy. These are tendencies, read together with everything else, and the class teacher takes them up from the first day.

Temperament and the course of life

The tradition also assigns a temperament to each phase of life as such, independent of the individual's own. Childhood is sanguine, youth choleric, the middle years melancholic, and old age phlegmatic. A choleric child is therefore a choleric temperament laid over a sanguine age, and a melancholic elder shows a melancholic constitution deepened by a phlegmatic phase. This is why the same temperament looks different at seven, seventeen, and seventy.

How the teacher works with them

In the Waldorf classroom the temperaments are worked with, never against. Steiner's instruction to the first Stuttgart teachers was to seat children of like temperament together: the cholerics in one group, the sanguines in another, and so on. Like wears down like. A cluster of cholerics rub the edges off one another; the sanguine children, sitting together, are steadied by seeing their own restlessness outside themselves. This is the homeopathic principle of the temperaments: the child is met with its own temperament, in a form it can see, and comes to balance through it.

The teacher also chooses material for each. The choleric child is given tasks that are genuinely hard and is met by an adult whose authority rests on calm and competence, not on force. The sanguine child needs a person to love, since a lasting bond to one adult is what holds a flitting attention. The phlegmatic child is reached through other children: the interests of playmates wake what direct address cannot. The melancholic child is not cheered up; it is given real sorrows to attend to, the sufferings of others in stories and in life, and a teacher who has known hardship and can speak of it. What each temperament needs is more of its own, offered so that it can be seen and outgrown.

Temperament in the adult

For the adult, the temperament becomes material for self-education. The choleric learns from situations that cannot be forced; the sanguine takes up something that requires long, unrewarded attention; the phlegmatic seeks out what stirs; the melancholic turns outward to the needs of others. Anthroposophic medicine reads the temperaments in the same way, as the constitutional ground on which illness tends to take a particular form, and eurythmy therapy has gestures for each.

The temperaments rest on the written pedagogical foundation as much as on the lectures. The Education of the Child, Steiner's essay of 1907, describes the members of the human being and their successive birth in the seven-year phases, and the doctrine of the temperaments follows from that picture.