Neuro-linguistic Programming is a specific modelling procedure originally used by NLP co-creator Richard Bandler whilst he was exposed to the work of Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir. What most people think of as NLP is in fact the collection of techniques that were borrowed, adapted and created in the course of developing that modelling process. These techniques, together with NLP itself, conititute the overall “field of NLP”.

The first steps in the development of NLP (the modelling process) occurred spontaneously whilst Richard Bandler was working with Virginia Satir during a lecture tour of Canada, and as editor of a book on Fritz Perls, and during its earliest stages was actually developed by Bandler and another student at the UCSC (University of California, Santa Cruz) named Frank Pucelik. But the Bandler/Pucelik project hit a brick wall, which led Bandler to seek the help of an assistant professor of linguistics (John Grinder) in order to formalize and codify his discovery so that he could teach his students more effectively.

(As Bandler was a fourth year student at the time, he was entitled, as part of the university’s policy, to run an undergraduate course of his own creation if he could find enough students prepared to pay to take the course.)

Thus the development of what is now the field of NLP began as an experimental university course, initially conducted by Bandler and Pucelik, then by Bandler, Pucelik and Grinder, and finally (from about 1975 onwards) by Bandler and Grinder. For most of the 1970s, academic interest in NLP was so limited that Dr Heap’s review (1988) lists only four articles/studies which pre-date 1980 (one of which even pre-dates the initial work on NLP). By the same token, Sharpley’s articles (1984, 1987) list only 8 early items, of which 3 date to the 1960s, 4 have no direct connection to the field of NLP as such, and only 3 relate to actual experiments.

Having said that, there were some very positive and public comments about Bandler and Grinder’s work, especially in response to the publication of their book Frogs into Princes (Real People Press, 1979), such as Professor Elizabeth Loftus’ mention of Bandler and Grinder’s ‘change personal history’ technique (Loftus, E.E. (1981) Memory and its distortions. In A.G. Kraut (ed.), The G. Stanley Hall Lecture Series (Washington DC: American Psychological Association. pp. 123-154., and an article by Daniel “Emotional Intelligence” Goleman, who described Bandler and Grinder, in a Psychology Today article of the same name, as “People who Read People” (Psychology Today, Vol.13, No. 2, July 1979).

The the appearance of Frogs into Princes also seems to have triggered a sudden jump in the number of Ph.D. candidates who selected some aspect of NLP as the subject for their doctoral thesis. Yut for some unknown reason, instead of taking their cue from the 1979 book, they instead turned to Bandler and Grinder’s earlier book The Structure of Magic II (Science and Behavior Books, 1976). Moreover a concept known as the “preferred representational system” (or PRS) became the focus of almost all of the experiments, with the experimenters investigating whether PRSs really existed, and if they did, whether they were ‘stable, how you could spot them and/or use them.

The “NLP Disproved” Myth

In 1983, an Australian Doctor of Psychology at the University of Monash – Christopher Sharpley – having attended a single NLP training course, decide that it was his duty to expose NLP for what (he thought) it was. This became the basis for a myth that has lasted for over 25 years. The belief that Sharpley’s review, and the experiments it related to, had somehow “disapproved [sic] the use of Neuro-linguistic Programming”.

Even very recently, (in July 2009, to be precise) an academic at the University of Glamorgan, in the UK, presented a precise of Sharpley’s claims in an attempt to demonstrate that “NLP masquerades as a legitimate form of psychotherapy, makes unsubstantiated claims about how humans think and behave, purports to encourage research in a vain attempt to gain credibility, yet fails to provide evidence that it actually works (Dr Gareth Roderique-Davies, Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Cargo Cult Psychology?, Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, Volume 1, Number 2, 2009. page 62.)

Numerous other academics have also written material which dismisses “NLP” as useless – Grant Devilly, Von Bergen, Singer and Lalich, etc., etc. But there is an underlying flaw in all of this material: much of it depends for its evidence, directly or indirectly, on Sharpley’s two articles from 1984 and 1987. But that presents some insurmountable problems:

1. Sharpley had a very poor understanding of the field of NLP, and seems to have believed that matching someone’s PRS was pretty much the whole basis for NLP;
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2. Because of the lack of accurate information all round, all of the experimenters whose work Sharpley examined, along with Sharpley himself, failed to spot two crucial facts:
   1. Predicate matching was in fact only one of several NLP-related techniques designed to create and maintain rapport, and
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   2. Bandler and Grinder were already in the process of writing the “preferred representational system” concept out of the NLP-related techniques in early 1978 (when they conducted the seminar which was transcribed and published as Frogs into Princes. Thus, by 1980, let alone by the time Sharpley wrote his articles, all of the so-called evidence was becoming more and more-out-of date.
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3. Sharpley was (and still is) convinced that “NLP” is a form of psychotherapy and demand that it be “scientifically” tested against other forms of therapy.

What is truly remarkable is the way academic psychologuists have continued to cite Sharpley’s material for a quarter of a century and yet, in all that time, it seems that few of them if any, with the exception of Einspruch and Forman, have bothered to examine that “evidence” to see if it was itself valid.

Even more telling is the fact that only psychologists seem to think that the field of NLP is all about therapy and therefore needs to be tested against some allegedly “scientific” standard. Academics working in the area of the sociology of religion, such as Hunt and Major, for example, make no such claims, and instead try to identify notional links between their ideas about “NLP” and “some forms of Eastern-oriented” religions. Perhaps not surprisingly, it seems that none of the academic psychologists has yet identified the “eastern-oriented religious” aspects of “NLP”.