The term ‘Acquired Temperament’ occupies a distinctive niche within the depth-psychology corpus, most precisely articulated in the Taoist-inflected psychological literature translated by Thomas Cleary and Liu Yiming, where it designates the overlay of habituated patterns, desires, and reactive dispositions that accumulates upon — and progressively obscures — an originally luminous innate nature. The concept stands in fundamental tension with the category of original or innate nature: acquired temperament is not the self as given but the self as distorted by worldly conditioning. This distinction resonates with Patristic and Philokalic anthropology, where the body’s temperament is a site of spiritual contest requiring self-regulatory disciplines to restore equilibrium. In the broader neuroscientific and developmental traditions surveyed here — Siegel, Schore, Panksepp — the same problematic appears under the rubric of the constitutional-versus-experiential dialectic: what is innate in psychological character and what is layered through experience, attachment, and learning. William James’s typological interest in temperament as the bedrock of religious sensibility, and Jung’s alertness to innate sensitiveness as distinct from pathological prehistory, further enrich the conceptual field. Across these traditions, the core tension is consistent: how much of character is given by nature, how much accumulated through developmental and cultural experience, and whether what has been acquired can be refined, transformed, or transcended.
once it is mixed with acquired temperament, it goes from clarity to obscurity and loses its basic nature. But as unclarity comes from oneself, so also does clarity come from oneself
This passage delivers the canonical formulation: acquired temperament is the contaminating overlay that veils the originally luminous innate nature, yet the same self that obscures can also illuminate.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis
This nature is originally truly open, subtly existing, radiantly bright, without obscurity; but once it is
Liu I-ming’s parallel recension confirms the doctrine that the primordial nature is intrinsically pure until acquired temperament introduces obscuration, framing the entire cultivation project as a recovery of what was lost.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis
the passions are roused through these three things: the memory, the body’s temperament, and the senses. The intellect that has shut out the senses, and has achieved a balance in the body’s temperament, has to fight only against its memories.
Thalassios the Libyan identifies the body’s temperament as one of three channels through which passions arise, situating temperamental balance as a prerequisite for higher ascetic and contemplative work.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
Personality in many ways is an amalgam of our experiences and our temperament. Davidson and colleagues’ research has shown that in childhood, these various traits are generally quite malleable.
Siegel frames temperament as constitutively intertwined with experiential history, emphasizing developmental plasticity and thus the modifiability of what might otherwise be treated as fixed character.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting
An individual’s characteristic pattern of high- or low-intensity responses may be a product of both constitutional and experiential factors.
Siegel’s neurobiological account directly parallels the innate/acquired distinction, arguing that emotional response patterns are shaped by both subcortical constitutional endowment and cortically-mediated learned experience.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting
far-reaching differences, which go back into earliest childhood, cannot be due to accidental events but must be regarded as innate… it would be more correct to say that this sensitiveness was inborn and naturally manifested itself most strongly in any unusual situation.
Jung distinguishes innate sensitiveness from acquired experiential shaping, arguing that certain psychological traits are constitutional rather than products of biographical history.
, Collected Works Volume 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis, 1961supporting
A certain innate sensitiveness produces a special prehistory, a special way of experiencing infantile events, which in their turn are not without influence on the development of the child’s view of the world.
The early Jung articulates a reciprocal model in which innate constitution and acquired biographical experience mutually condition one another, resisting any simple nature-nurture dichotomy.
, Collected Works Volume 1: Psychiatric Studies, 1902supporting
most behaviors are intermixtures of innate and learned tendencies.
Panksepp’s affective neuroscience generalizes the acquired/innate tension across species, insisting that behavioral and emotional repertoires are invariably composites of heritable architecture and experiential acquisition.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting
His temperament being what it was, he almost immediately started asking questions which hitherto had received but little attention.
Von Franz invokes Jung’s own temperament as the motivating force behind his clinical innovations, illustrating how character — whether innate or acquired — shapes intellectual orientation.
, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975aside
masking a sensitive and deeply thoughtful temperament with habitual silence. There is the likelihood typical of difficult Saturnian aspects, of a ‘vicious circle’ perpetuating itself
Greene’s astrological-psychological analysis treats temperament as an interface between constitutional disposition and acquired behavioral pattern, noting how defensive habits can calcify around an underlying sensitive character.
, Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil, 1976aside
‘Natures’… are simply developing phenotypes, whether common or rare, and they emerge and change by the constant ‘nurture’ of developmental interactions.
Thompson, drawing on Oyama, dissolves the nature/nurture binary by reconceiving ‘nature’ as a developmental product rather than a fixed prior, directly undercutting essentialist readings of either innate or acquired temperament.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside