The Academic and Intellectual Antecedents of NLP

In this article, I explore the rich antecedents that directly and indirectly influenced the development of Neuro-Linguistic Programming 

Neuro-Linguistic Programming was built upon the work of people who were extraordinary in their field of endeavour. Great people such as Fritz Perls, Milton Erickson, and Virginia Satir were modelled by the NLP co-creators, John Grinder and Richard Bandler supported by a talented group of people to test the patterning they were modelling and coding. 

As well as the direct modelling of Perls, Satir, and Erickson, the NLP co-creators drew upon the work of esteemed linguists, psychologists, and cybernetics experts as supporting theory for NLP. 

During the NLP development and research phase, the NLP co-creators recruited a group of sharp young minds to rigorously test the patterning being modelled. The NLP creators and their co-developers all resided at a country estate in the Santa Cruz Mountains, owned by Bob Spizter, the proprietor of Science and Behaviour books, and publisher of the work of many of the psychology greats at the time. This close proximity of residence enabled the NLP originators to deeply explore the patterning and test, test and test until each pattern had been fully validated. 

Aside from the modelling mentioned above, there were other great minds whose work inspired the NLP co-creators and influenced the theory and practice of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

The work of Gregory Bateson, the respected British academic, was influential in shaping NLP, with ideas from systemic epistemology, meta communication, double bind theory, multiple description, cybernetics and set theory (Betrend Russell) for logical levels and types all featuring in NLP models and processes. 

Then there is Count Alfred Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics theory, whose well known dictum ‘the map is not the territory’ (Korzybski, 1933) became the key distinction for NLP epistemology, with the premise of filtering systems operating within the nervous system and language to build our mental maps, clearly separating our maps from reality itself. 

Noam Chomsky’s Transformational Grammar is the academic foundation of NLP, with its Automata Theory underpinnings giving us the original 4-tuple in Neuro-Linguistic Programming applied to representational inputs and internal processes. 

Generative language systems demonstrate that languages are generative in the sense of a system of mental rules that allows humans to create and understand an infinite number of brand-new, grammatically correct sentences using a finite set of words and rules expressed mathematically as G = (V, Σ, R, S).

This theory is applied isomorphically to our work in NLP for generative change and our ability to randomly and unconsciously generate new resources and states by accessing different components embedded deep in our tacit knowledge and ordering them naturally in a form that we previously have not expressed, for us to naturally generate new choices, where choice was once lacking. 

And of course, the Transformational Grammar provided the linguistic code for NLP’s Meta Model to challenge the syntactical anomalies expressed verbally in one’s linguistic surface structure, to access the information (VAKOG) linguistically held in the deep structure that has been subject to distortion, deletion, and generalisation.

Flipping the Meta Model application inversely, the same syntactic rules are utilised in the possibilities inherent in the vagueness of natural language for a person to be guided to deeper and more generative representations to create choices with how the respond to inputs, access new internal processes (4 tuples) to have generative outputs with their states and behaviours, this model with Erickson as the source is known as the ‘Milton Model’

John Grinder, as part of his PhD research, worked in George A. Miller’s lab at Rockefeller University. Miller, a founder of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and psycholinguistics, had made a significant contribution to the theory of short-term and working memory with his groundbreaking paper, ‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two’ (Miller 1956). Miller’s research published in this paper determined the number of objects an average person could hold in short-term memory (7, plus or minus 2).
The 7, plus or minus 2, is a significant feature in NLP epistemology,, explaining the bandwidth of what we call the conscious mind and its limited processing capability expressed by representations, with NLP adding the 4-tuple, where units of expression have different values, such as synaesthesia representations where two modalities are experienced simultaneously.

Miller, along with Karl Pribram and Eugene Gallanter, authored the now seminal book, ‘Plans to the Structure of Behaviour’ (1960), which challenged the rote and linear theories of behaviourism, replacing stimulus-response theory with the TOTE model, Test, Operate, Test, Exit, cognitively modelling internal processing of our responses to sensory inputs

The NLP co-creators overlapped the TOTE with the 4 Tuple and the ‘plans’ noted by Miller, Gallanter and Pribram for the structure of behaviour were coded in either external or internal VAKO/G representations, with loops until the criteria of the first test was met.  This in NLP became known as strategies and was published in the book Neuro Linguistic Programming Volume 1 (Dilts et el 1980)

By any standard, the academic antecedents which influenced the development of Neuro-Linguistic Programming were impressive, as were the patterns coded in NLP from their influence, yet stand as NLP patterns from the adaptations and modelling. Additionally, all the influencers and models were fully referenced and thus credited in the NLP publications.