[Neurons] 2016 "Neurons" #44 Abraham Maslow & Carl Rogers' Contributions to NLP

[L. Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2016 "Neurons" Meta Reflections - #44

September 19, 2016

Reflections about NLP #9

 

 

ABRAHAM MASLOW & CARL ROGERS'

CONTRIBUTIONS TO NLP

 

 

When I wrote about the contributions of Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, and
Gregory Bateson to the development of NLP in the previous posts, I
frequently noted that they were all second-generation leaders in the Human
Potential Movement (HPM).  That is highly significant because of their
relationship to Maslow and Rogers and to the HPM.  I noted this in the
article I wrote back in 2005 about "The Secret History of NLP."  That was
when I found out that the very persons modeled by Bandler and Grinder worked
together and lived together at Esalen in the early 1960s.1

 

Imagine that!  They lived and worked together at Esalen as leaders in the
Human Potential Movement. Do you know what that means?  For one thing, it
identifies the psychology that they all were involved in, a psychology
separated from Behaviorism and Psychoanalysis, the first two "forces" in
psychology.  They were involved in the third force of psychology.  This
terminology came from Maslow himself and was crystalized in the book,  The
Third Force: The Psychology of Abraham Maslow (1970) by Frank G. Goble.

 

What is the psychology of NLP?  Yes, it is Cognitive Psychology in that it
came from the leaders of that Cognitive Psychology movement-George Miller
and Noam Chomsky.  It is cognitive to the extent that we operate in the
world using our mental models or maps as Alfred Korzybski noted, "the map is
not the territory."  Yet more essential than that, the psychology of NLP is
Humanistic Psychology or Self-Actualization Psychology.

 

Humanistic Psychology operates predominantly from the idea that there is
within human beings a drive for excellence and that even when we do bad or
evil things, it's not because that is our nature.  There is within a
positive intention-we are doing the best we can given our mental
understandings and our skills.  Human evil arises from ignorance,
misinformation, desperation, lack of development, etc.  We have all the
resources to handle the challenges of life.  To fulfill that, we need to
truly and adequate meet our needs and understand ourselves and then develop
effective strategies.

 

In NLP all of these essential ideas are contained in "The Presuppositions of
NLP."  These ideas, collected originally by Robert Dilts, summarize the key
premises that NLP operates from.  Where did they come from?  What was the
original source of these presuppositions?  Ah, this is an amazing thing!  I
once assumed that those presuppositions were the premises or assumptions
that the original developers collected from Perls, Satir, Erickson, Bateson,
and Korzybski.  Then when I took the time to go back and read through all of
the original works of Maslow and Rogers, I found that almost all of those
presuppositions were already present.  They came out of the HPM as the
assumptive premises of that kind of Psychology.

 

What else in NLP goes back to what Maslow and Rogers contributed?  Modeling!
It was Abraham Maslow, who forty-five years before Bandler and Grinder,
began modeling his two incredible mentors.  He began studying Max Wertheimer
who co-founded Gestalt Psychology and Ruth Benedict who was the founder of
Cultural Anthropology.  He took notes about them writing down their
behaviors and characteristics and from his "good humans studies" he began a
30-year study with his graduate students of Self-Actualizing People.  So
even the idea of modeling outstanding individuals did not start with NLP,
but with Maslow.

 

As Maslow was writing his book on Abnormal Psychology, a massive work on all
of the ways human nature goes wrong, he began wondering about the other
side.  This was the sick side.  Was there a healthy side?  Thinking in terms
of a bell-curve, was there are exceptional, superior, and excellent
outliers.  To find out, that's what initiated his modeling of Max and Ruth.

 

NLP certainly did not start from scratch.  There are many forces that
contributed.  NLP did not invent new premises that had never been heard of
before.  Instead, what happened at the beginning and what created what we
today know as Neuro-Linguistic Program arose from a movement-the Human
Potential Movement. 

 

Here's more evidence of the connection between NLP and the Human Potential
Movement.  Consider for example where NLP originated.  It originated at
Kresge College, a college that began in 1971 as an alternative and
experimental college on the campus of the University of California- Santa
Cruz.   This college would have been named the Carl Rogers College if it had
not been for the rich donor.

"The college was designed with the concept of participatory democracy as a
means of encouraging a strong sense of community.  The vision was for the
college to be a place where students enjoyed a sense of creativity,
community, and individuality." (UCSC's website)

"Robert Edger, the provost of Kresge ... decided to develop and run an
innovative experiment in academic organization, using Kresge College as a
test case. The experiment was a living/learning model for Kresge- a model of
how to develop community within the boundary conditions of a college at a
university..." (Grinder, Origins, p. 175)

"Groups ... a popular theme on Kresge College campus ... The college had
instituted the process of T-Groups, frequently described as a form of
sensitivity training."  (Carmen Bostic-St. Clair, Origins, p. 241)

 

Perhaps a sad loss to NLP was the fact that while the original developers
obviously could not have modeled Maslow, he died in 1970 as did Perls.  But
Carl Rogers lived until 1980 (same as did Erickson and Bateson) and NLP
began at his college.  Yet in the years of the beginning of NLP (1971-1976),
Rogers never appeared on campus.  He was at the University in Chicago at the
time. 

 

Notes:

1. You can see that article on the Neuro-Semantic website and in the book,
Self-Actualization Psychology. 

 

 

 

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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