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The book on temperament by Burks and Rubenstein makes a significant contribution to the understanding of adult personality and to the psychotherapy of personality disorders. Derived from the work of Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas, whose focus was on temperamental attributes and disturbances in children, this book attempts to delineate personality qualities in adults that should be considered outgrowths of inborn tendencies to react and therefore manifestations of temperament. Few authors have paid attention to these attributes, even in the recent psychiatric literature (Akistal et al., 1977; Wittenborn and Maurer, 1977; Escalona, 1968; Cadoret, 1978 and Stone, 1979). A generation earlier, several Scandinavian investigators (Sjøbring, 1958 and Perris, 1966) were exploring temperament factors; from these studies, a number of temperament scales were devised (Bech et al., 1978), none of which has enjoyed much popularity in this country. Few psychoanalysts have attempted to incorporate the concept of temperament into their metapsychological framework. The work of Burks and Rubenstein is addressed to this lack, and represents an attempt to broaden our traditional views of approaches to personality disorders, through inclusion of impressions about our patients' chief temperament features.
The authors have analyzed a number of subjects according to a nine-item temperament scale, based on the Chess-Alexander infant-temperament scale, but refurbished for use with an adult population. These items include activity level, rhythmicity, intensity, threshold of responsiveness, etc. Their data suggested the compartmentalization of the ensuing temperament “profiles” into six main temperament categories. They found, that is, that most adults could be seen as having, predominantly, one or another of six temperaments, in accordance with whether they were most apt to relate to the world with persistence, withdrawal, intensity, approach, adaptiveness or activity. Burks and Rubenstein ga