From: lady@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Lee Lady)
Subject: Re: NLP - what exactly is it?
Followup-To: sci.cognitive, alt.self.improve
Summary: A Brief History of NLP
Organization: University of Hawaii (Mathematics Dept)
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 11:18:28 GMT

In article <1992Aug14.134104.1491@ccc.govt.nz> greg@ccc.govt.nz (Greg West) writes:
>
>I keep hearing about neurolinguistic programming.
>What exactly is it and what is it used for?

Here is an article I originally posted to sci.psychology in March, 1990.  

In response to various people that have written me, some of whom my mailer 
has not been able to find, here is most of what I know about the history 
of NLP.  Don Steiny knows a lot more than I do, but I hope what I give 
here is more accurate than not.  The chronology is undoubtedly a bit 
jumbled, and I am relying in large part on my memory of various verbal 
communications from my NLP teachers, but I hope I have kept the mere 
gossip to a minimum.  

NLP started in the 70's (1974?) at U.C. Santa Cruz where Richard 
Bandler was a long-haired chain-smoking gestalt therapist and Leslie 
Cameron was doing the practicum for her MA in clinical psychology by 
by helping to run Bandler's gestalt group.  Bandler had done his own 
training as a therapist under a well know child psychiatrist whose name, 
unfortunately, I don't have at hand.  Leslie was an extremely intuitive 
young therapist with a very sharp mind but who (from what I gather) 
was also insecure about a lot of things, especially relationships.  I 
think she'd been married twice at this time.  

John Grinder at this time was in the linguistics department at UC 
Santa Cruz.  Bandler invited Grinder to observe his gestalt group in order 
to see whether it would be possible to develop a syntax of behavior 
analogous to what some linguists had earlier done for cultural anthropology. 

What Grinder noticed was that Bandler in his group was applying certain 
principles of linguistics -- what I think of as being General Semantics 
(although Bandler & Ginder never use that term).  Bandler and Grinder 
then decided to observe groups run by Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir, and 
they confirmed that Perls and Satir were using the same linguistic patterns. 
(They also noticed that Virginia Satir would speak to some clients in 
primarily visual terms, to others in auditory language, using more 
kinesthetically oriented language with still others.  Satir had been 
unaware that she was doing this.)  

They wrote up their findings in THE STRUCTURE OF MAGIC, vol. 1 (Meta Press, 
1975), which most people find the most unreadable of all the NLP books.  The 
linguistic patterns described in this book now seem to be a core part of 
most programs in clinical psychology, although apparently credit is seldom 
given to Bandler and Grinder.  THE STRUCTURE OF MAGIC, vol. 2 (1976) 
discusses various aspects of non-verbal communication and is now obsolete.  
It shows that at this time Bandler & Grinder were still thinking primarily 
in terms of gestalt therapy with some of Virginia Satir's ideas 
thrown in.  (As NLP developed, Satir had conflicting feelings toward it.  
NLP would observe her work and point out very skillful covert things she 
did with clients to get her results.  Once she realized she was doing 
these covert things, Satir would stop doing them, because manipulation was 
against her principles.  Toward the end of her life, Satir was the keynote 
speaker at a couple of conventions of the National Association of NLP.)  

In the intellectually adventurous atmosphere at UC Santa Cruz, John Grinder 
was able to offer a psychology course where he and Bandler taught their 
approaches to therapy.  Among students, this was reportedly known as "Dr. 
Grinder's mind-fuck course."  Eventually UC Santa Cruz de-authorized the 
course apparently on the grounds that the teaching method constituted 
unauthorized experimentation with human subjects.  (In NLP courses, time is 
usually equally divided between lectures, demonstrations with volunteers, 
and exercises where students practice techniques on each other.)  

Bandler and Grinder continued to offer training seminars for therapists, 
and were joined by several young therapists and graduate students in 
clinical psychology, including David Gordon, Judith deLozier (who married 
Grinder), Robert Dilts, and Steve Gilligan.  Some time in these early days 
Bandler came up with the name Neuro-Linguistic Programming, which has 
continued to plague the subject to this day.  (NEURO-LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING,
vol. 1 by Dilts, Grinder, Bandler, DeLozier, and Cameron-Bandler appeared 
from Meta Publications in 1979.  There has never been a volume 2.)  

Some of the NLP group traveled to Phoenix, AZ to participate in Milton 
Erickson's seminars and observe his work with clients.  Erickson's work 
gave Bandler and Grinder ideas that took them far beyond what they had 
learned from Perls and Satir.  They wrote a two-volume book titled PATTERNS
IN THE HYPNOTIC TECHNIQUES OF MILTON ERICKSON (1975, 1977), written in a 
fairly dry attempt at a scholarly style.  The book is still essential 
reading (IMHO) for anyone with a serious interest in hypnosis.  David Gordon 
(and Steve Gilligan) became interested in Erickson's technique of curing 
patients' problems by telling them stories, and developed the NLP technique 
called "metaphor."  David Gordon wrote a book called THERAPEUTIC METAPHOR 
(Meta Publications, 1978).  

During this time in Santa Cruz the NLP group was involved in extremely 
adventurous exploration, sometimes being downright irresponsible.  There 
are stories of Bandler & Grinder giving phobias to unsuspecting people 
in shopping malls, and Steve Gilligan putting waitresses into momentary 
trances while they were taking his order.  

For one memorable weekend, Gilligan walked around in a deep trance 
identification with Milton Erickson, while Leslie Cameron (Bandler) was in 
a deep trance identification with Virginia Satir.  I don't know what 
the results of Gilligan's believing he was Erickson for a whole weekend were, 
bu for Leslie there were some dramatic personality changes.  Among other 
things, she came out of that weekend with a totally different, softer 
voice, with her harsh Oklahoma accent almost completely gone.  

Bandler & Grinder were reportedly not really much interested in teaching 
as such.  I've been told that their idea was simply to do things with the 
students in their seminars which they personally would find interesting, 
with the idea that students would somehow automatically learn something 
from the process.  They would give students impossible exercises to do, 
and sometimes students would succeed because they didn't know the tasks 
were impossible.  Once they told a seminar that one can tell what people 
are thinking by watching the ways their eyes move, and asked students to 
discover how to do this.  To their surprise, students came up with what 
are now know as eye accessing cues.  

In a Chicago seminar, there was a woman who claimed that she didn't have 
any bad memories.  The NLPers asked her some questions to find out how that 
was possible, and as a result developed the technique called VK Dissociation, 
which later became the first half of the Fast Phobia/Trauma Cure.  

(People who think that the essence of science lies in carefully designed 
experiments should consider the idea that without this sort of adventurous 
exploration there wouldn't be any worthwhile hypotheses for experimenters 
to test.)  

Undoubtedly I've got the chronology somewhat mixed up here.  But from what 
I can figure out, this Santa Cruz period covered about five or six years. 
Somewhere towards the end of that time Steve and Connirae Andreas showed 
up.  Steve Andreas was the son of Barry Stevens (DON'T PUSH THE RIVER)  
and the editor of "Gestalt Therapy Verbatim," a collection of pieces about 
and by Fritz Perls.  He had given up his former name, John O. Stevens, when 
he married Connirae.  [Note added in 1991:  Connirae Andreas now has a
Ph.D. in clinical psychology.]  They now run one of the leading NLP 
centers in the country, NLP Comprehensive in Boulder, CO.  Andreas took
tapes of some of the Bandler-Grinder seminars and edited them into
three books called FROGS INTO PRINCES (1979), TRANCE-FORMATIONS (1981),
AND REFRAMING (1982).

These books are full of dramatic anecdotes about Bandler and Grinder's work 
with various clients, along with a somewhat unsystematic but engrossing 
presentation of the basic ideas and techniques.  They were given new age 
covers and published by Real People Press in Utah, and have sold millions 
of copies (I believe) in mainstream bookstores across the country.  Much 
more recently, the Andreases have edited two more books with the same format 
which present the NLP "submodality" techniques:  USING YOUR BRAIN -- FOR 
A CHANGE (1985) by Bandler, and CHANGE YOUR MIND AND KEEP THE CHANGE (1987) 
by Steve and Connirae Andreas themselves.  Just this year Steve and Connirae 
have come out with a new book HEART OF THE MIND, but I haven't yet seen it. 

Basically the Santa Cruz group broke up because people couldn't deal with 
Bandler's personality any more, especially his heavy use of cocaine.  More 
recently, Bandler was involved in the murder of a professional dominatrix 
(for which he was acquitted).  Last year, MOTHER JONES ran an article 
about the case called "The Bandler Method," which is apparently fairly 
accurate and also has some interesting biographical information about 
Bandler and the early days of NLP.  Leslie divorced Bandler after a few 
years, and is now married to another NLPer, Michael Lebeau.  

Bandler sued to maintain proprietary rights to NLP, and lost.  One of 
the results of that seem to be that now essentially anybody who wants to 
can set themselves up as an NLP expert.  Here in Hawaii a lot of people 
have been through courses by a very charismatic individual named Tony 
Robbins, whose training went no further than the basic practitioner course 
and who at one time was giving NLP workshops where participants walked 
across a bed of hot coals.  (I have no personal experience of Tony Robbins, 
but one of my friends says he does "disco NLP.")  

Steve Gilligan left the NLP group early on, and seems to have achieved a 
certain respectability as a leader in the field of Ericksonian hypnosis.  
Ericksonian hypnosis and NLP share a lot of ideas, and in the Bay Area 
at least there is a lot of intermingling between the Ericksonian people 
and the NLP people.  

There are NLP centers all over the country now, and more books than I can 
reasonably list here.  Plus a very large number of videotapes, mostly 
showing excerpts from NLP seminars and usually demonstrating specific 
techniques.  The quality varies enormously.  I especially recommend the 
two videotapes showing sessions with Leslie Cameron Bandler:  "Making 
Futures Real," and "Lasting Feelings,"  showing her doing therapy for 
weight control and for jealousy.  But at $180 apiece, obviously they are 
intended for the serious student.  

The source I use for NLP books and tapes is NLP Comprehensive, 2897 Valmont 
Rd, Boulder, CO 80301.  This is run by Steve and Connirae Andreas, and I 
have found them to be fast and reliable.  

--

Imagination is more important than knowledge.  -- Einstein 

lady@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu         lady@uhunix.bitnet
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive