Therapy

NLP is often thought of as a form of psychotherapy. Nothing can be further away from the truth. In fact NLP has been developed in the seventies as a criticism of psychotherapy.

Where are the new physicians of the soul? – It has been the means of comfort which have bestowed upon life that fundamental character of suffering it is now believed to possess; the worst sickness of mankind originated in the way in which they have combated their sicknesses, and what seemed to cure has in the long run produced something worse than that which it was supposed to overcome. The means which worked immediately, anesthetizing and intoxicating, the so-called consolations, were ignorantly supposed to be actual cures; the fact was not even noticed, indeed, that these instantaneous alleviations often had to be paid for with a general and profound worsening of the complaint, that the invalid had to suffer from the after-effect of intoxication, later from the withdrawal of intoxication, and later still from an oppressive general feeling of restlessness, nervous agitation and ill-health. Past a certain degree of sickness one never recovered .- the physicians of the soul, those universally believed in and worshipped, saw to that. – It is said of Schopenhauer, and with justice, that after they had been neglected for so long he again took seriously the sufferings of mankind: where is he who, after they have been neglected for so long, will again take seriously the antidotes to these sufferings and put in the pillory the unheard-of quack-doctoring with which, under the most glorious names, mankind has hitherto been accustomed to treat the sicknesses of its soul?

Daybreak paragraph 52

Time

Time is especially important within NLP. The brain creates something called a time line which is a visual and spatial representation of time.

The logic of our conscious thinking is only a crude and facilitated form of the thinking needed by our organism, indeed by the particular organs of our organism. For example, a thinking-at-the-same-time is needed of which we have hardly an inkling. Or perhaps an artist of language does: reckoning back with the weight and the lightness of syllables, reckoning ahead, and at the same time looking for analogies between the weight of the thought and the phonetic, or physiological, conditions of the larynx: all this happens at the same time – though not consciously. Our feeling of causation is something quite crude and isolated compared to our organism’s real feelings of causality. In particular, ‘before’ and ‘after’ is a great piece of naivety. Finally: we first had to acquire everything for consciousness: a sense of time, a sense of place, a sense of causality; it having long existed, and far more richly, without consciousness. And what we acquired was a certain simplest, plainest, most reduced form: our conscious willing, feeling, thinking is in the service of a much more comprehensive willing feeling thinking. – Really? We are still growing continually, our sense of time and place, etc., is still developing.

Notebook 34, April-June 1885 paragraph 124

Our subjective experience of time can be influenced by NLP and hypnosis.

The length of the day. – When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.

Human, All Too Human, part 1, paragraph 529