the development of NLP. Now a revolutionary figure prominent in US politics, he became very anti-establishment at the time of the Vietnam War. Chomsky’s work on general semantics first appeared in a range of published papers and culminated in the 1957 publication Syntactic Structures (now out of print). This work established the transformational model of language, with its concepts of deep structure and surface structure, elements which feature heavily in NLP’s approach to precision in language. Chomsky’s 1965 book Aspects of Theory and Syntax, published by MIT Press, is an easier publication for the general reader.
Gregory Bateson
Bateson was a British anthropologist and author who influenced several of NLP’s leading proponents. His father, a geneticist who coined the word ‘genetics’, named him after the famous Russian geneticist Gregor Mendel.
Bateson wrote on a range of topics including communications, systems theory/cybernetics, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, biological evolution and genetics. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his first attempts to synthesize cybernetic ideas with anthropological data. He was ‘ethnologist’ at the Veterans Administration Hospital at Palo Alto from 1949 until 1962. At the time he was married to Margaret Mead, another famous anthropologist, who also worked with him on many projects.
Later, Bateson’s communication studies were extended to the animal kingdom and, together with his then wife, Lois, he kept about a dozen octopuses in their living-room! He went on to become director of a dolphin laboratory in the Virgin Islands, where he continued his studies on communications in animals for about a year. In 1963 he went to the Oceanic Institute in Hawaii to work on problems of animal and human communication and it was there that he wrote most of his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972).
Bateson also led the Palo Alto Group (see page 35) and lectured at the University of Santa Cruz at the time that Bandler and Grinder were developing NLP. He was a neighbour of Bandler’s and it was he who suggested that Bandler and Grinder visit Milton Erickson (see Erickson, page 40).
Bateson considered that ideas were not abstract concepts, but the basis for the way people live their lives. He said that people should think and act systemically, by allowing both conscious and unconscious processes to shape their decisions, and by developing congruity in diverse parts of the mind. In the preface to Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Mark Engel says:
The central idea in this book is that we create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads … but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in … For a man to change his basic, perception-determining beliefs … he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be.
Carlos Castaneda
An anthropologist and writer whose works greatly influenced Bandler and Grinder and their associates, Castaneda made great use of metaphor, often in conversational dialogues, and some of his ideas were to form the basis for therapeutic interventions. His thoughts on ‘stopping the world’ – a concept where the mind is stilled to allow expansion of consciousness – was one of the underpinning elements of New Code NLP (see Chapter 3).
Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer and Peter Checkland
These systems thinkers and writers have strongly influenced NLP. Ashby originated the Law of Requisite Variety in 1956, emphasizing that it is important to keep exploring variations when working towards results. The principle behind his theory is that, in any system, the part that has the most flexibility will predominate, and as a system becomes more complex, more flexibility is required. Beer provided models which can be used with both individuals and organizations, and Checkland was the developer of ‘soft systems’ thinking.
Albert Ellis
A psychotherapist, writer and lecturer whose work was a major influence on several people working in NLP, especially Robert Dilts and Judith DeLozier, Ellis felt that traditional therapy sessions were too long and tried a more active approach based on work by early philosophers. His technique – Rational-Emotive Therapy, or RET – was a synthesis of psychology and philosophy. It has been described as ‘perhaps the most widely practised form of the cognitive-behavioural therapies’ (Yankura and Dryden, Doing RET: Albert Ellis in Action, Springer Publishing Company, 1990). Ellis concentrated on an individual’s beliefs and identified both rational and irrational beliefs during therapy; his work also incorporated shifts in time in a similar way to that employed by NLP (see Chapter 3).
Roberto Assagioli
Assagioli is known as the founder of psychosynthesis, on which he published the seminal book in 1965. In recent years, his work has been rediscovered and Michael Hall, an American therapist and NLP trainer, has written of it in the American NLP publication Anchorpoint
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