With the finale of the second season of Apple TV’s most popular show, Severance, being on everyone’s mind, here is a look into some of the (pseudo)science that inspired core concepts explored in this psychological thriller, starting with Kier’s four tempers.
*Cue the Severance theme song*
In Severance we are introduced to a company called Lumon, founded by Kier Eagan, that lets you separate (or sever) your work self from your personal life. This gives rise to these two personas, your innie (who is at work), and your outie (who is not at work) and neither of these personas retain memories from the other. As we explore the lives of four workers at this company, we start to see them question what they are working towards and who they are working for. In that process, we find out more about the founding of the company and its mission and without giving much away, we get introduced to this concept of Kier’s four tempers, namely woe, malice, frolic and dread. Simply put, the founder of Lumon believed that every human soul was made up by a ratio of these four emotional components and that by controlling these tempers, one could control themselves and their environment. So, where do these tempers come from, are they inspired by actual psychology and is this relevant today? Spoiler alert: People might be too complicated to divide into simple categories but that has not stopped us from trying.
The concept of categorising one’s character is not far-fetched (shoutout to everyone who read their horoscope today) and this dates all the way back to Ancient Greece and India. Empedocles, a Greek philosopher, proposed that all matter was made of four elements (air, water, fire, earth) which could be influenced by cosmic forces of love and strife. Hippocrates, a famous Greek physician and philosopher, and his students applied and wrote about this theory, relating it to health by introducing the 4 humors which corresponded to the 4 elements. They went against the popular belief of illness being caused by supernatural causes and believed that imbalances in body fluids (humors), namely blood (air), phlegm (water), yellow bile (fire) and black bile (earth) caused illnesses. Similarly, in ancient India, Ayurvedic Medicine also related health to the disbalance between three humours that were associated with the five elements of space, namely, vata (air and space), kapha (earth and water), and pitta (fire and water).
Centuries later, during the Roman Empire, a Greek physician Galen associated the 4 humors to certain organs and categorised their extremes into four temperaments explaining behavior, namely:
- Sanguine: Excess blood (related to the marrow) resulting in excess happiness
- Phelgmatic: Excess phlegm (related to the lungs) causing excess calm
- Choleric: Excess yellow bile (related to the liver/gall bladder) causing excess anger
- Melancholic: Excess black bile (related to the spleen) causing excess sadness
Thus, looking at one’s behavior, one could categorise illness and restore health by manipulating the affected body fluids. Traditional Chinese Medicine also related the elements to certain organs and emotions where a disbalance in the life energy chi would lead to illnesses. While these ways of categorising and treating illnesses were rejected by advances in the medical field, these theories heavily influenced subsequent explanations for human behaviour and personalities.
Muslim philosopher, Avicenna, further expanded on Galen’s temperaments relating it more to emotions and morality. He wrote about how balanced humors, and in turn temperaments, led to good character. Nicholas Culpeper, an English physician, then claimed that the humors could be influenced by astrological changes and that the combination of certain temperaments led to one’s personality traits. A boom in temperament research was seen once German philosopher Immanuel Kant translated Galen’s writings and differentiated between physical and psychological temperaments. Scales and categories showing the dynamic and combinatorial nature of emotions that influence personalities became prevalent. Prominent contributions included Hans Eysenck’s personality model that statistically categorised people ‘s personality based on three factors, neuroticism (negative emotions like nervousness), extraversion (sociability) and psychoticism (aggression and impulsiveness). Combinations of these factors made the four temperaments as follows:
- Sanguine: Low neuroticism and psychoticism but high extraversion
- Phelgmatic: Low neuroticism, psychoticism and extraversion
- Choleric: High neuroticism, psychoticism and extraversion
- Melancholic: High neuroticism but low extraversion and psychoticism
Relating all this back to Severance, the four tempers seem to represent the four temperaments as follows: frolic - sanguine, dread - phlegmatic, malice - choleric and woe - melancholic. Our 4 main characters’ personalities also seem to be dominated by one of these four tempers and their associated neuroticism, extraversion and psychoticism scales. Namely, Dylan falls into the sanguine category due to his easygoing personality while Irving has phlegmatic or calm character traits. Contrastingly, Helly with her restlessness and aggression represents the choleric temperament with Mark being melancholic and pessimistic. While the series is yet to answer all the questions behind the significance of the tempers, we see the innie’s personalities starting child-like and them interacting with Lumon in different ways. This could be a nod to the work of Rudolph Steiner who used the temperaments to categorise children in order to inform how educators should approach their learning. He emphasized how temperaments can become more balanced with age which we start to see in the Lumon world, where the innie’s personalities seem to grow with time.
In modern society, the theory of four temperaments lacks scientific merit. Yet, we continue to look for ways to categorise human behaviour, be it through cosmic forces (astrology), tests that assign you one personality type (Myers-Briggs Indicator assessment, Buzzfeed quizzes), or more acceptable but still biased tests that look at character traits as spectrums (Big Five Inventory). While it remains doubtful if something as complex and dynamic as personality can be successfully and reliably generalised into well-represented categories, one cannot deny the fun and (delusional) satisfaction associated with categorising the unknown. Hence, for your merriment, find out which of the Kier’s tempers or innie character you embody and take the results with a healthy dose of scientific skepticism (I got woe and Mark).
Simran Dhir a second year PhD student in Pharmacology.
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