Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is a controversial approach to psychotherapy and organizational change based on “a model of interpersonal communication chiefly concerned with the relationship between successful patterns of behaviour and the subjective experiences (esp. patterns of thought) underlying them” and “a system of alternative therapy based on this which seeks to educate people in self-awareness and effective communication, and to change their patterns of mental and emotional behaviour”. The co-founders, Richard Bandler and linguist John Grinder, claimed it would be instrumental in “finding ways to help people have better, fuller and richer lives”. They coined the title to denote their belief in a connection between neurological processes (‘neuro’), language (‘linguistic’) and behavioral patterns that have been learned through experience (‘programming’) and that can be organized to achieve specific goals in life. NLP was originally promoted by its co-founders in the 1970s as an effective and rapid form of psychological therapy, capable of addressing the full range of problems which psychologists are likely to encounter, such as phobias, depression, habit disorder, psychosomatic illnesses, and learning disorders. It also espoused the potential for self-determination through overcoming learned limitations and emphasized well-being and healthy functioning. Later, it was promoted as a “science of excellence”, derived from the study or “modeling”[11] of how successful or outstanding people in different fields obtain their results. It was claimed that these skills can be learned by anyone to improve their effectiveness both personally and professionally Despite its popularity, NLP has been largely ignored by conventional social science because of issues of professional credibility and insufficient empirical evidence to substantiate its models and claimed effectiveness. It appears to have little impact on academic psychology, and limited impact on mainstream psychotherapy and counselling. However, it had some influence among private psychotherapists, including hypnotherapists, to the extent that some claim to be trained in NLP and apply it to their practice. NLP had greater influence in management training, life coaching, and the self-help industry.
NLP originated when Richard Bandler, a student at University of California, Santa Cruz, was listening to and selecting portions of taped therapy sessions of the late Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls as a project for Robert Spitzer. Bandler believed he recognized particular word and sentence structures which facilitated the acceptance of Perls’ therapeutic suggestions. Bandler took this idea to one of his university lecturers, John Grinder, a linguist. Together they studied Perls’ via tape and observed a second therapist Virginia Satir to produce what they termed the meta model, a model for gathering information and challenging a client’s language and underlying thinking.[19]
The meta model was presented in 1975 in two volumes, The Structure of Magic I: A Book About Language and Therapy and The Structure of Magic II: A Book About Communication and Change, in which they expressed their belief that the therapeutic “magic” as performed in therapy by Perls and Satir, and by performers in any complex human activity, had structure that could be learned by others given the appropriate models. They believed that implicit in the behavior of Perls and Satir was the ability to challenge distortion, generalization and deletion in a client’s language. For example:
* Client: “I just feel terrible.”
* Therapist: “What specifically do you ‘feel terrible’ about?”
* Client: “… my performance yesterday.”
* Therapist: “What ‘performance’, specifically?”
* “…”
The linguistic aspects were based in part on previous work by Grinder using Noam Chomsky’s transformational grammar. Challenging linguistic distortions, specifying generalizations, and recovery of deleted information in the client utterances, the surface structure, was supposed to yield a more complete representation of the underlying deep structure, and to have therapeutic benefit. They drew ideas from Gregory Bateson and Alfred Korzybski, particularly about human modeling and ideas associated with their expression, “the map is not the territory”.
Satir and Bateson each agreed to write a preface to Bandler and Grinder’s first book. Bateson also introduced the pair to Milton Erickson who became their third model. Erickson also wrote a preface to Bandler and Grinder’s two-volume book series based their observations of Erickson working with clients, Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, Volumes I & II. These volumes also focused on the language patterns and some non-verbal patterns that Bandler and Grinder believed they observed in Erickson. While the meta model is intentionally specific, the Milton model was described as “artfully vague” and metaphoric; the inverse of the meta model. It was used in combination with the meta model as a softener, to induce trance, and to deliver indirect therapeutic suggestion. In addition to the first two models, Bandler, Grinder and a group of students who joined them during the early period of development of NLP, proposed other models and techniques, such as anchoring, reframing, submodalities, perceptual positions, and representational systems.
At the time, the human potential movement was developing into an industry, at the centre of this growth was the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California. Perls had led numerous Gestalt therapy seminars at Esalen. Satir was an early leader and Bateson was a guest teacher. Bandler and Grinder claimed that in addition to being a therapeutic method, NLP was also a study of communication, and by the 1970s Grinder and Bandler were marketing it as a business tool, claiming that “if any human being can do anything, so can you”. After 150 students paid $1,000 each for a ten-day workshop in Santa Cruz, California, Bandler and Grinder gave up academic writing and produced popular books from seminar transcripts, such as Frogs into Princes, which sold more than 270,000 copies. According to court documents, Bandler’s NLP business made more than $800,000 in 1980.