[Neurons] 2013 Meta Reflections #23 A Book Review by L. Michael Hall

[L. Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2013 Meta Reflections #23

May 13, 2013

 

BOOK REVIEW Of

 

THE ORIGINS OF NLP

 

Edited by John Grinder and R. Frank Pucelik

 

 

 
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D

.

 

 

Finally we have a second book on the history of NLP, one that adds more
information about the early days and gives much more of a human face to the
adventure called NLP.  In 1990 Terry McClendon published the first book, The
Wild Days: NLP 1972-1981.  This now gives us two books on the early history.
Yet while we have a second book, it is still not complete and there's lots
more about the history and origins of NLP that is missing from this book.

 

A couple years ago I talked with many of those who were at the beginning and
commented that if we don't get some of the stories from the people who were
there, many of those stories would be lost to history.   At about that time
I was writing a series of seventeen installments on the History of NLP (you
can find on  <http://www.neurosemantics.com/> www.neurosemantics.com/
Articles).  Later I approached several of those original people to see if
several of us could collaborate on writing a history.  That did not work out
and I will tell a little bit of that story shortly.  But I did achieve one
thing -I provoked John Grinder sufficiently so that he put out this volume!
So at least we have his point of view in this book- in fact, this book is
mostly, the origins of NLP from Grinder's perspective.  Those who disagreed
with him for the most part are not in this one!  And for anyone John
disagrees with, he wrote a "Commentary" that corrects their
misunderstandings.

 

I'm genuinely delighted to see this book in print because it really does put
more of a human face on the origins and enables us to see a little bit more
into the minds and hearts of the men and women who brought about the field
of NLP.  It also highlights the cultural context of the early 1970s in
southern California where NLP arose.  And yes, the book is one-sided in that
it fails to deal with the darker-side of NLP- the conflicts, the lawsuits,
the breakups (all of which John Grinder seems to deny or pretend does not
exist).  All that he says in the whole book about that is "... there are
severe issues with its [NLP's] quality" (p. 220).  No kidding!  Only Stephen
Gilligan alludes to this in a short paragraph on page 93:

" While the base of my experience was tremendously positive, the underbelly
of 1970s NLP included an arrogant, "take no prisoners" contempt for all
"outsiders" in which anybody and anything was fair game for ridicule. This
antagonistic attitude seemed to deepen as NLP moved to an international
level, culminating in a mid-1980s cacophony of lawsuits, criminal charges,
bad mouthing, and other unpleasantries. The principle that the "map is not
the territory" seemed altogether forgotten in such events, and NLP suffered
as a result.   Of course, you cannot speak about NLP in the singular
anymore, as there are many different modes and forms."

 

This lack of balance in the book strikes me as trying hard to put a positive
turn on things so much that it fails to address much of the legacy that we
have inherited in NLP- the disdain of much of Psychology and Academia for
NLP, the negative P.R. that is prevalent around the world about NLP, why and
how the early people in NLP did not engage in research or create an
association that would "police" people misusing the technology of NLP, why
and how they got into fights, divided, spoke ill of each other, etc.  All
that will be for another book on the history of NLP.

 

The Six Months Delay of "Origins" 

Originally, The Origins of NLP was to be released at the NLP Conference in
London in November, 2012.  That did not happen.  Why not?  What happened?
Apparently, after getting the ten contributors to write their chapters, John
Grinder didn't like Robert Dilts' chapter and ended up writing 25 pages of
notes to correct Robert's memory!  Robert wrote 25 pages to make up his
chapter, Chapter 10 "My Early History with NLP," but production stopped due
to the 25 pages of corrections that John wanted to include.  I'm not sure
how it was eventually worked out or who negotiated the truce, but in the end
the "corrections" were not put into the text.  That only took six months to
work out.

 

Well, I say not put into the text ... from what I know, John apparently gave
up on his position of keeping those corrections in the text after Dilts'
chapter as a "Commentary" chapter, and instead sneaked some of them into his
chapter, "The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind" which is the
longest chapter of the book-50 pages, a chapter that mostly rambles on and
on.

 

The book has ten contributors- John Grinder, Carmen Bostic-St. Claire, R.
Frank Pucelik, Terry McClendon, Judith DeLozier, David R. Wick, Byron Lewis,
Stephen Gilligan, James Eicher, Robert Dilts.  All together John wrote five
contributions, he wrote two "Commentaries" on what the others wrote and then
a long list of "corrections" about things he disagreed with.  It was as if
he could not help himself to let the contributors have their own voice-their
own opinion and memory about things.  You can see this in his long
introduction about how memory is fallible and undependable and how many of
the things the others write about just did not happen!  Claiming it is his
act of responsibility, he wrote, "It takes the form of a warning."
Actually, two warnings:

1. A significant portion of what is described never happened!" (page 5)

                2. Memory is selective and essentially incomplete!  (page 6)

 

The Origins of NLP is really a John Grinder book.  After all, together John
and Carmen wrote 130 pages of the 253 pages of the book.  Fifty of the pages
is in John's chapter, then he wrote another 46 pages along with Carmon's
Preface and Epilogue of 35 pages.  And in doing so, they have essentially
written Volume II of their book on Whispering in the Wind.1    Both John and
Carmen quote writings in Whispering as if it were a sacred text that
corrects all errors(!).

 

After his warnings, John fills the book with his biases about what "real"
NLP is about.  Nor does John seem undaunted by his presumption of correcting
others and putting them in their place.  Writing on page 16, he says:

"I take it as co-author of Origins, I have the prerogative to edit what the
authors in this section have written.  At the same time, this requirement is
to be balanced with the strategy that Frank and I have adopted for the
presentation of the history of The Origins of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
More specifically, the strategy that we pursue here is to rely on the
intelligence of the readers to assimilate the representations by different
authors that diverge in significant ways and through some multi-angulation
of these divergent descriptions from distinct perceptual positions to arrive
at their own understanding of what occurred."

 

The Value of the Book

Do I recommend this book?  Yes, it's a very good book!  It is a valuable
read for many reasons.  What you will discover are lots of historical facts
about the earliest period: 1971-1972 when Richard and Frank were playing
around with Gestalt Therapy.  The next period: 1972-1974 when John entered
and they began using Transformational Grammar to model the language patterns
of Perls and Satir, and finally 1974 and following when the Meta-Model was
developed, used, and published that launched NLP as such.

 

You'll discover that terminology of NLP- "Neuro-Linguistic Programming" came
about in 1976 and that it was not until almost the end of the 1970s that the
formatting of practitioner and master practitioner developed.  I especially
enjoyed the chapters by Frank Pucelik, Terry McClendon, Robert Dilts, and
Stephen Gilligan.  Their spirit and attitude of NLP reflects how I think
about NLP and wrote in the book, The Spirit of NLP (1996).

 

 

What's New?

The third co-creator of NLP!  This is actually the first work that fully
identifies Frank Pucelik as "the third man" who played a co-creating role in
the origins of NLP.  Grinder had mentioned this in Whisperings (2002) and I
had written an article on Frank in my series on the History of NLP, and
there was a interview with Frank in Rapport.  But mostly prior to this,
there was very little record of Frank and his role in the origins.  In
almost every history of NLP it is always Richard and John.  From now on, we
will be seeing that "there were three who worked together and co-created
NLP, Richard, John, and Frank."

 

What's also unknown to most NLP practitioners is that Frank and Judith
DeLozier were married prior to moving to Santa Cruz; then after their
break-up, Judith and John married.  During that time, Frank and Leslie
Cameron dated and became partners ("life partners" to use his words from his
chapter); this was prior to Leslie and Richard Bandler marrying.  Given
that, I found it fascinating that Judith wrote a mere 4 pages for her
chapter.  What she doesn't say seems thunderous.  I wonder if there will be
more forthcoming?

 

Frank's chapter speaks about John, Judy, and Leslie going to visit Milton
and something unspecified happening that led to he and Leslie to end their
relationships and shortly thereafter Richard inviting (making a "request")
for Frank to leave.  Obviously there's as much unsaid about all of that, so
there's much more of the story yet to be described.

 

NLP was born of some Encounter Groups.  This also is new!  The Origins of
NLP highlights Frank's role in first working with Richard doing the gestalt
"encounter groups" and then inviting John into the experience to model the
linguistic structure of what they were doing.  From Frank also we learn that
there were two original groups of people who brought about NLP, the first
group, called "the meta people" or the "meta kids" by Frank, experimented
with the encounter group format and helped developed the Meta-Model.  The
second group experimented with the Meta-Model, Milton Model, Strategies,
etc.  An interesting fact about these two groups is that none of the people
in the first group stayed with the development whereas almost every single
person in the second group went on to become the leading NLP Trainers,
Developers, Thinkers and Writers.

 

A discovery that Origins reveals is that Kresge College itself and the
experimenting pre-NLP groups grew out of the Encounter Groups.  John Grinder
made this explicit in his chapter:

"The particular form used to develop this Living/Learning Community was a
model of communication lifted from the National Training Laboratory called
the T Group or sensitivity training. Originally a form of group
psychotherapy, the T Group was adapted for non-therapeutic purposes:
development of community, studies in small (8-15 members) group dynamics.
Thus at a minimum of once a week for several hours (often, more frequently
and with longer hours), T-Groups assembled (groups of 8-15 people,
consisting of a faculty member, a trained T Group facilitator and a mix of
staff and students." (P. 173)

 

Now imagine that!  Today's overly individualistic NLP field full of many
sub-communities began as an Encounter Group!  It was created in the context
of twelve to twenty people (as identified by Frank Pucelik in his chapter)
experiencing "gestalt" therapy as practiced by Richard and Frank and later
analyzed by John.  NLP began as a community!  How about that!?  In fact, in
reading through the chapters of Origins I wondered many times about how the
justice or accuracy in accrediting only the co-founders and not the
community of people that they worked with, practiced on, and learned from as
the full source of NLP?

 

The Cognitive Psychology Foundation of NLP.   Most of us have long known
that the key personalities responsible for the Cognitive Resolution in
Psychology- Noam Chomsky and George Miller were at the heart of the
development of NLP.  This explains why "NLP" is usually put under the
category of "Cognitive Psychology" in textbooks.  Interesting enough, John
Grinder revealed something that I didn't know that further establishes this
connection:

"I had spent one academic year as a Guest Researcher at George Miller's lab
at Rockefeller University in New York City (1969-70) and had great respect
for Miller's work." (P. 139)

 

Of course, John cannot leave it there or accept even this as he noted- 

"I mention in passing that during this era and consistently since, I have
refused the classification of NLP as a part of academic psychology.
Academic psychology, at least as practiced in the states, is the study of
the average performance and activities of people given certain tasks - a
statistical approach to the study of human behavior. This was and remains
the domain of psychology. NLP, in contrast, is the study of one of the
extremes of human performance, the patterning of genius, the patterning of
the most advanced performers available." (P. 141)

 

Now for the Back Story -    

The Book is "a Severely Bad Idea" (John Grinder)

Now here is what you don't know and will not read in the book The Origins of
NLP.  In 2009- 2010 Wyatt Woodsmall and myself decided that we would
collaborate together on a book on the history of NLP.  I asked Wyatt to work
with me on the book because Wyatt was one of my original trainers in NLP and
because of the high regard that I hold him in terms of intelligence and
integrity.  After discussions with Martin Roberts, Wyatt, Terry McClendon,
Frank Pucelik, Robert Dilts and others, my idea was to write a book and
title it, In Their Own Words.

 

The book would be a collection of as many of the voices that we could get
from those early days and we would do no editing.  We would collect the
chapters, ask the contributors to write in the area where each would feel
the most passion about their actual experience.  Then we would write some
Reflections at the end of the book using some of our own experiences in the
field of NLP.  So we made a list of all of the contributors, 25 or more and
began to contact them.

 

Everybody I wrote to, or spoke with, thought that it was idea whose time had
come and said in essence, "Great, let's do it."  I wrote to both Richard
Bandler and John Grinder, both who immediately refused.  It was John Grinder
who first wrote back and asked in a demanding way, "Who are these so-called
'developers of NLP'?"  When I tried to relieve his fears by saying, "It is
you, Richard, Frank and the others who were at the beginning."  He wrote
back declaring, "It is a severely bad idea" and he said he would have no
part of it!  I wanted to know what led him to think that.  That's when he
became not a little bit rude with me.

"I personally think that you being associated with any representation of the
history and origins of NLP is a bad joke.  From my own point of view, your
writings -the only connection I have ever had with you - demonstrated a
extremely limited grasp of NLP.  I had hoped that you would desist
representing NLP so ineptly and would focus on the development of
Neuro-Semantics - now you show up again, acting as if you are qualified to
comment on the origins and history of NLP - events that you (and the
majority of people you list as contributors) have zero direct experience of.
So, I decline and I invite you to take a step back from this project.  I do
not recognize any contribution you have made as being in the field of NLP
and therefore find it ludicious that you would propose this book." (Email,
December 13, 2010)

 

Determine to not respond in kind I wrote back and commented that I was
"stunned and disappointed" in his response.  "I had hoped for better."  Then
I wrote some words that I knew would be provocative and that in the mind of
a mis-matcher would stir him up:

"The history will be told with you or without you.  I made the offer, I had
hoped you were up to the task.  If you'd like to add a touch of
Neuro-Semantics to sweeten your NLP, let me know.  I think it really needs
it."

 

I then ended my email as I do with everyone, "To your highest and best."
Within the next three weeks, many of the people who had agreed to write the
book, In their Own Voice, wrote to me and said that they "had to back out."
They said that they were going to write their chapter now for John's book.
I smiled.  "Ah, I provoked him!"  He's going to do a history book on the
origins even though he thinks it is "a severely bad idea."  Good.

 

The Origins of NLP -a fascinating book which provides wonderful glimpses
into more of the history of NLP.  In the book you will get bits and pieces
of a dozen or two human stories as it presents many of the men and women who
initiated the beginning of the adventure that we call Neuro-Linguistic
Programming.  You will discover that NLP was created by a community and in a
community of people fascinated by personal growth and development.  And for
me, that is the true spirit of NLP that we need to recover today.

 

 

Author: 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.  A student, researcher, and author of NLP since the
late 1980s and author of over 40 books in the field of NLP, many of them
best sellers in spite of what John Grinder thinks(!).  Some of the history
of NLP has been written in the book, Self-Actualization Psychology (2010)
and the series of 17 articles on the history of NLP can be found at
<http://www.neurosemantics.com/> www.neurosemantics.com.  For "The Secret
History of NLP" see Rapport and other journals as well as the Neuro-Semantic
website.

 

 




 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

                Neuro-Semantics Executive Director 

                Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

                1 970-523-7877 

                Dr. Hall's email:
<mailto:meta at acsol.net\hich\af31506\dbch\af31505\loch\f31506> meta at acsol.net


     

    

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