Kretschemer's theory: relationship between body and temperament

Trait-focused explanations have not always reigned in the study of personality. At the beginning of the last century, several proposals for somatic explanations began to appear, such as the Kretschemer biotype, who descend from a way of understanding psychology that goes back to the times of hippocrates.

Next we see Kretschemer's theory and how it relates the different body constitutions with attributes of human temperament.

• Related article: "The theory of the four humors, by Hippocrates"

Kretschemer's constitutional model

From the biological theories of personality, it is based on the idea that human behavior basically depends on physical characteristics of the organism, and not so much in the variables related to the context in which it lives. These theories have their roots in the first steps of medicine typical of the Greek territory, yes it is normal that their approaches are biologists.

This constitutional model, in psychiatry, is represented by Kretschemer. Ernst Kretschemer, a German psychiatrist, was interested in the problems of physical constitution and how the vegetative and endocrinal mechanisms determine it. He theorized that these had some kind of relationship with the formation of the 

temperament of each person. In addition, he worked to unravel the relationship between a person's character, his constitution and psychiatric syndromes.

The fruit of these efforts was reflected in the constitutional model of his personality. For Kretschmer, the constitution is made up of all the characteristics with which an individual is born. This includes the genotype that interacts 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 between them.

Drawing on clinical observations and anthropometric investigations, Kretschmer describes a constitutional typology in which he advocates the existence of four main types:

1. leptosomal

Kretschmer's theory describes the leptosomal person as having long arms, a high neck, and a sunken chin. A kind of Don Quixote both in physique and in temperament. The leptosomal is shy, hypersensitive, eccentric and he tends to live in his own fantasy world.

2. Pyknic

This guy is described as a stocky, pot-bellied person. He 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, cheerful, good natured, practical and down to earth.

3. Athletic

The athletic one has powerful muscles, hard and strong bones, broad shoulders and narrow waist. It corresponds to a type of physique similar to that of Superman. The temperament of individuals with the athletic type is associated with relentlessness, emotional coldness and aggressiveness. They are highly competitive individuals.

4. dysplastic

This is the rarest constitutional type. All body proportions are unbalanced and, appropriately, so is his temper. This type, according to Kretschmer's observations, is associated with endocrine disorders and, very frequently, with schizophrenia severe.

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 for one type and further away for another. For this, not all people show a profile that exactly corresponds 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 the different constitutional types.

• You may be interested in: "The 4 temperaments of the human being"

Criticism 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 drinks directly from ideas as unscientific as the humors of Hippocrates has serious deficiencies in its validity.

On the one hand, the Kretschmer model sins of being not 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: those features that are not described in the model and does not offer a flexible explanation for those cases that are 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 schizophrenics, and men. The model, ignoring internal consistency and coherence issues, cannot be extrapolated to the general population.

On the other hand, although the Kretschmer biotypes constitute an interesting antecedent of a break with the psychiatric tradition Considering that normality and disease do not have a clear limit but rather a matter of degree, he offers an explanation of personality through circular reasoning. Kretschmer does not ground the theory rigorously, but rather the theory grounds 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 antiquated way of understanding personality.