[Neurons] 2016 Neurons --- The Gestalt Base of NLP

[L. Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2016 "Neurons" Meta Reflections - #33

July 11, 2016

Reflections about NLP #1

 

THE GESTALT BASE OF NLP

 

If you ask, "Where did NLP come from?" there are multiple answers.  One of
the central answers is Gestalt Therapy.  It arose in the context of a
Gestalt Class that Richard Bander and Frank Pucelik started at the new
Kresge College at the University of California at Santa Cruz.  There they
practiced Gestalt practices and principles that they had learned.  Frank
learned Gestalt Therapy at a University in San Diego where he studied prior
to coming to Santa Cruz.  Richard never studied Gestalt.  He learned about
it from books and from the audio and videos tapes of Fritz Perls which Dr.
Robert Spitzer gave him to transcribe.  From those transcriptions, Spitzer
published the book, The Gestalt Approach and Eye Witness to Therapy (1973). 

 

When NLP began-and long before it was called "Neuro-Linguistic
Programming"-it began as a class studying how Fritz Perls encountered people
to help them develop more fully as human beings.  What they added to Gestalt
was a structural analysis- that's when John Grinder got involved.  Then
together with the group, they began wondering about how the language
patterns and experiential processes were able to create the changes that the
group was experiencing.

 

Yet-and this may be surprising-they did not invent so much as they
appropriate what they found and put it together under the name "NLP."  What
follows describes many of the things that NLP inherited from Gestalt.  How
these facts got shuffled to the back and de-emphasized, I don't know.  Nor
do I understand why those who launched NLP didn't highlight these facts.
After all, from my perspective, they validate and give even more credibility
to the birth of NLP, not less.  Here are some of the things  we (NLP)
inherited from Gestalt.

 

1) Sensory Awareness.  The focus on awareness, especially on sensory-based
awareness, came from Fritz Perls.  Perls' focus was known for his "Now I am
aware ..." exercise.  He would have a person start every sentence with this
line as a way to develop sensory awareness.  It invited people into the
present- and to be present in this moment.

"Become aware of his gestures, breathing, emotions, voice, facial
expressions.  The more he becomes aware of himself, the more he will learn
about what his self is.   "Now I am aware..."  The Gestalt Approach (p. 65) 

"... the patient must come to his 'senses.'  He must learn to see what is
there and not what he imagines to be there.  He must stop hallucinating,
transferring, and projecting." Gestalt Approach (p. 104)

 

2) The Sensory Representational System. 

NLP also received its focus on the VAK.  An extensive description of each
sensory system is detailed in Gestalt Therapy (1951) in the third chapter.
There Perls goes through the visual system, auditory, kinesthetic (body
awareness) and from there remembering, imagining, emoting, verbalizing.  NLP
did not invent the VAK- it was in the Gestalt experiments and processes that
goes back to the early 1950s.

3) Patterns.  In NLP we have lots and lots of what we call "patterns."
These are not new.  In fact in the 1951 book on Gestalt Therapy there are
dozens and dozens of patterns there, called "experiments."  The design was
to get people to experiment with their awareness in order to shift and
change it, to try on the possibilities.  Fritz Perls and his co-authors of
that book, Ralph Hefferline and Paul Goodman, presented the experiments as
trials to facilitate people to engage in specific observations about
themselves and their experiences to either confirm or disconfirm an idea or
hypothesis.  Ah, yes, that's what any scientific experiment seeks to do.  It
does not seek to "prove" something, but to either confirm or disconfirm a
hypothesis that they are testing.

 

4) Holistic Patterning and Constructionism.  Perls defined gestalt as
"configuration, structure, theme, structural relationship (Korzybski) or
meaningful organized whole ..." (1951, p. ix).  From Perls also they got the
content/structure distinction.  That was the distinction that Fritz
presented repeatedly and which NLP inherited.  It was also from Perls and
Gestalt that they became acquainted with Korzybski.  In Gestalt Therapy it
was Fritz who quoted and referred to Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics.

"Although the content is what is said is important, it is much more the
structure, the syntax, the style, that reveals character and underlying
motivation." (Gestalt Therapy, p. 216)

"The therapy consists in analyzing the internal structure of the actual
experience... not so much what is being experienced, remembered, done, said,
etc., as how what is being remembered is remembered, or how what is said is
said..."

"A gestalt is a pattern, a configuration, the particular form of
organization of the individual parts that go into its make up.  Basic
premise: human nature is organized into patterns or wholes."  The Gestalt
Approach, (p. 5)

 

5) From Why to How.  In NLP we strongly emphasize that we don't ask why,
especially when a person is in an unresourceful state.  Instead we focus on
how-and that gives us a focus on modeling the structure of an experience.
Again, this is not an NLP invention.  It came from Fritz.

"Therapy oriented to the past is invalid because the whys of the patient's
neurosis really explain very little.  'Why' opens up an endless series of
questions which can only be answered by a first cause that is self-caused.
How will an explanation which makes the aunt the villain in the piece solve
his problem.  Such an explanation only gives the patient license to project
all his difficulties onto the aunt.  It gives him a scapegoat, not an
answer."  The Gestalt Approach (p. 54)

"These are the questions that start with 'why?'  The 'why' questions produce
only pat answers, defensiveness, rationalizations, excuses, and the delusion
that an event can be explained by a single cause.  Not so with the 'how.'
Those inquires into the structure of an event, and once the structure is
clear all the whys are automatically answered. ... If we spend our time
looking for causes instead of structure we may as well give up the idea of
therapy and join the group of worrying grandmothers who attack their prey
with such pointless questions as 'Why did you catch that cold?'  'Why have
you been so naughty.'" Gestalt Approach (p. 77)

 

6) Figure / Ground Distinction.   A gestalt involving the relationship
between figure and background and in a "good gestalt" a figure stands out
against a ground so that it finishes what is started.  And what about this
statement from Fritz:  "In such a case, all attention tends to flow from the
ground of what one is into the figure of what one is becoming."  That's
sounds like the structure of the Swish pattern to me.  Could it be that the
NLP Swish pattern came originally from Fritz and all that happened in NLP
was that someone (and from what I can tell, it was Christine Hall) who
invented a process for doing the Swish.

7) The Phobia Cure pattern.   In NLP we have a pattern that "cures" phobias
and that can take the emotional charge out of a strong reactive emotional
state.  The pattern involves playing a movie through to the end as you
remember it and then rewinding it to the beginning.   That's why I have
always called it The Movie Rewind Pattern.  The following was written in the
context of reversing functions and playing around with the images that
people entertain in their minds.   Perls said, "Turn the pictures upside
down." Yet long before Richard Bandler claims to have invented it, in 1951
Fritz Perls wrote:

"Imagine the motions around you as if they occurred the other way around, as
in a reverse-motion moving picture film, where a diver sails gracefully from
the springboard into the water, and then with equal ease flies back up from
the water to the springboard." (Gestalt Therapy, p. 47)

 

8) Meta-Model Distinctions.  There are the linguistic distinctions that
Perls introduced.  Most famously was his constant challenges to the modal
operators of necessity: should, must, have to.

"If you say, 'I must do them,' who is supplying the 'must'?  You,
apparently, for you are not compelled from outside.  What if you didn't do
them?  No blow would fall. ... Suppose you say, 'I want to do them but some
part of me objects.'"

 

9) Emphasis on Authenticity.  One of the things that Bandler heard on the
tapes from Perls and transcribed in that 1973 book was about using Gestalt
to enable people to get real.  This was Perls way of talking about
self-actualization- a theme that seemed to elude Bandler and the NLP
movement for many, many years.

"The idea of Gestalt therapy is to change paper people to real people.  To
make the whole man of our time come to life and to teach him to use his
inborn potential to be ... a leader without being a rebel, having a center,
instead of living lopsided."  Gestalt Approach  (p. 120)

 

10) Responsibility.  If there was one thing that the first Human Potential
Movement emphasized, at least what Maslow and Rogers stressed, it was
responsibility.  Perls as one of the second generation leaders of that
movement also emphasized it.  Here are two quotations, both in the book
Bandler transcribed.

"Without awareness, there is no cognition of choice." The Gestalt Approach
(p. 66)

"Responsibility is really response-ability, the ability to choose one's
reactions. ... The therapist's primary responsibility is not to let go
unchallenged any statement or behavior which is not representative of the
self, which is evidence of the patient's lack of self-responsibility."
Gestalt Approach (p. 79, 80)

 

Wow!  That's a lot!  NLP inherited a lot of what we today present as
"Neuro-Linguistic Programming" from Gestalt.  NLP did not invent it.
Instead the originators appropriated it from Gestalt, and then, failed to
give full credit to its source.  They stood on the shoulder of these giants
and saw further, but did not fully acknowledge those shoulders. 

 

Sources:

Perls, Fritz.  (1973).  The Gestalt Approach and Eye Witness to Therapy. CA:
Science and Behavior Books.

Perls, Frederick; Hefferline, Ralph; Goodman, Paul.  (1951).  Gestalt
Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality.  New York: Dell
Publishing Co.

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

               Neuro-Semantics Executive Director 

               Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

               1 970-523-7877 

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