Category: NLP in general

NLP is very critical of what psychologists do. In fact the stance in psychology of distance, observing and empathy is exactly what NLP found doesn’t work.

Moral for psychologists. — Not to go in for backstairs psychology. Never to observe in order to observe! That gives a false perspective, leads to squinting and something forced and exaggerated. Experience as the wish to experience does not succeed. One must not eye oneself while having an experience; else the eye becomes “an evil eye.” A born psychologist guards instinctively against seeing in order to see; the same is true of the born painter. He never works “from nature”; he leaves it to his instinct, to his camera obscura, to sift through and express the “case,” “nature,” that which is “experienced.” He is conscious only of what is general, of the conclusion, the result: he does not know arbitrary abstractions from an individual case. What happens when one proceeds differently? For example, if, in the manner of the Parisian novelists, one goes in for backstairs psychology and deals in gossip, wholesale and retail? Then one lies in wait for reality, as it were, and every evening one brings home a handful of curiosities. But note what finally comes of all this: a heap of splotches, a mosaic at best, but in any case something added together, something restless, a mess of screaming colors. The worst in this respect is accomplished by the Goncourts; they do not put three sentences together without really hurting the eye, the psychologist’s eye. Nature, estimated artistically, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is chance. To study “from nature” seems to me to be a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism; this lying in the dust before petit faits [little facts] is unworthy of a whole artist. To see what is — that is the mark of another kind of spirit, the anti-artistic, the factual. One must know who one is.

Twilight of the Idols, Skirmishes of an Untimely Man, paragraph 7

NLP has been developed in 1970s by Richard Bandler as a criticism of psychology. His criticism was that psychology was wrong to think that they could get objective knowledge about mankind. NLP on the other hand focuses on the subjective experience people have rather than a hopeless quest for objectivity.

However gratefully we might approach the objective spirit – and who hasn’t been sick to death at least once of everything subjective, with its damned ipsissimosity! – nevertheless, in the end we even have to be cautious of our gratitude, and put an end to the exaggerated terms in which people have recently been celebrating the desubjectivization and depersonification of spirit, as if this were some sort of goal in itself, some sort of redemption or transfiguration. This kind of thing tends to happen within the pessimist school, which has reasons of its own for regarding “disinterested knowing” with the greatest respect. The objective man who no longer swears or complains like the pessimist does, the ideal scholar who expresses the scientific instinct as it finally blossoms and blooms all the way (after things have gone partly or wholly wrong a thousand times over) – he is certainly one of the most expensive tools there is: but he belongs in the hands of someone more powerful. He is only a tool, we will say: he is a mirror, – he is not an “end in himself.” The objective man is really a mirror: he is used to subordinating himself in front of anything that wants to be known, without any other pleasure than that of knowing, of “mirroring forth.” He waits until something comes along and then spreads himself gently towards it, so that even light footsteps and the passing by of a ghostly being are not lost on his surface and skin. He has so thoroughly become a passageway and reflection of strange shapes and events, that whatever is left in him of a “person” strikes him as accidental, often arbitrary, and still more often as disruptive. It takes an effort for him to think back on “himself,” and he is not infrequently mistaken when he does. He easily confuses himself with others, he is wrong about his own basic needs, and this is the only respect in which he is crude and careless. Maybe his health is making him suffer, or the pettiness and provincial airs of a wife or a friend, or the lack of companions and company, – all right then, he makes himself think about his sufferings: but to no avail! His thoughts have already wandered off, towards more general issues, and by the next day he does not know how to help himself any more than he knew the day before. He has lost any serious engagement with the issue as well as the time to spend on it: he is cheerful, not for lack of needs but for lack of hands to grasp his neediness. The obliging manner in which he typically approaches things and experiences, the sunny and natural hospitality with which he accepts everything that comes at him, his type of thoughtless goodwill, of dangerous lack of concern for Yeses and Noes: oh, there are plenty of times when he has to pay for these virtues of his! – and being human, he all too easily becomes the worthless residue of these virtues. If you want him to love or hate (I mean love and hate as a god, woman, or animal would understand the terms –) he will do what he can and give what he can. But do not be surprised if it is not much, – if this is where he comes across as fake, fragile, questionable, and brittle. His love is forced, his hatred artificial and more like un tour de force, a little piece of vanity and exaggeration. He is sincere only to the extent that he is allowed to be objective: he is “nature” and “natural” only in his cheerful totality. His mirror-like soul is forever smoothing itself out; it does not know how to affirm or negate any more. He does not command; and neither does he destroy. “Je ne m´eprise presque rien”, he says with Leibniz: that presque should not be overlooked or underestimated! He is no paragon of humanity; he does not go in front of anyone or behind. In general, he puts himself at too great a distance to have any basis for choosing between good or evil. If people have mistaken him for a philosopher for so long, for a Caesar-like man who cultivates and breeds, for the brutal man of culture – then they have paid him much too high an honor and overlooked what is most essential about him, – he is a tool, a piece of slave (although, without a doubt, the most sublime type of slave) but nothing in himself, – presque rien! The objective person is a tool, an expensive measuring instrument and piece of mirror art that is easily injured and spoiled and should be honored and protected; but he is not a goal, not a departure or a fresh start, he is not the sort of complementary person in which the rest of existence justifies itself. He is not a conclusion – and still less a beginning, begetter or first cause; there is nothing tough, powerful or self-supporting that wants to dominate. Rather, he is only a gentle, brushed-off, refined, agile pot of forms, who first has to wait for some sort of content or substance in order “to shape” himself accordingly, – he is generally a man without substance or content, a “selfless” man. And consequently, in parenthesi, nothing for women. –

Beyond Good & Evil paragraph 207

NLP holds that reality is unknown to us. Only how we subjectively experience reality is known to us.

In prison. – My eyes, however strong or weak they may be, can see only a certain distance, and it is within the space encompassed by this distance that I live and move, the line of this horizon constitutes my immediate fate, in great things and small, from which I cannot escape. Around every being there is described a similar concentric circle, which has a mid-point and is peculiar to him. Our ears enclose us within a comparable circle, and so does our sense of touch. Now, it is by these horizons, within which each of us encloses his senses as if behind prison walls, that we measure the world, we say that this is near and that far, this is big and that small, this is hard and that soft: this measuring we call sensation – and it is all of it an error! According to the average quantity of experiences and excitations possible to us at any particular point of time one measures one’s life as being short or long, poor or rich, full or empty: and according to the average human life one measures that of all other creatures – all of it an error! If our eyes were a hundredfold sharper, man would appear to us tremendously tall; it is possible, indeed, to imagine organs by virtue of which he would be felt as immeasurable. On the other hand, organs could be so constituted that whole solar systems were viewed contracted and packed together like a single cell: and to beings of an opposite constitution a cell of the human body could present itself, in motion, construction and harmony, as a solar system. The habits of our senses have woven us into lies and deception of sensation: these again are the basis of all our judgments and ‘knowledge’ – there is absolutely no escape, no backway or bypath into the real world! We sit within our net, we spiders, and whatever we may catch in it, we can catch nothing at all except that which allows itself to be caught in precisely our net.

Daybreak paragraph 117

Richard Bandler is the genius who created NLP. If you would compare him to most other NLP trainers it is enough to replace “scholar” in the Nietzsche quote below with “average NLP trainer”. Some people take offence to calling Richard Bandler the creator of NLP. They claim he is the “co-creator” together with John Grinder. But fact is that when they split up Richard Bandler and John Grinder decided among the two of them to call themselves “co-creators”. This was a way out of the problems that had with each other. Those people who take offence this way are trying to unbend the taut NLP bow and remove Richard Bandler from the history of NLP.

It is impressive how the NLP community at large has been hypnotized by this claim. Whereas in fact as long as nobody can point to the parts of NLP that are supposedly developed by John Grinder he hasn’t created anything of value in modern NLP. For there would be no NLP whatsoever without Richard Bandler. Whereas there would have been NLP without John Grinder. NLP would only have grown less fast without John Grinder. So with the exception of the only true genius that NLP has known, Richard Bandler, all other big names of NLP are NLP scholars in the sense as described below:

Compared to a genius, which is to say: compared to a being that either begets or gives birth (taking both words in their widest scope –), the scholar, the average man of science, is somewhat like an old maid. Like her, he has no expertise in the two most valuable acts performed by humanity. And, as a sort of compensation, both the scholar and the old maid are admitted to be respectable – respectability is always emphasized – although in both cases we are annoyed by the obligatory nature of this admission. Let us look more closely: what is the scientific man? In the first place, he is an ignoble type of person with the virtues that an ignoble type will have: this type is not dominant, authoritative, or self-sufficient. He is industrious, he is patiently lined up in an orderly array, he is regular and moderate in his abilities and needs, he has an instinct for his own kind and for the needs of his kind. These needs include: that piece of independence and green pasture without which there is no quiet for him to work in, that claim to honor and acknowledgment (whose first and foremost presupposition is recognition and being recognizable –), that sunshine of a good name, that constant seal on his value and his utility which is needed, time and again, in order to overcome the inner mistrust that lies at the bottom of the heart of all dependent men and herd animals. It is only fair that the scholar has the diseases and bad habits of an ignoble type as well. He is full of petty jealousies and has eyes like a hawk for the base aspects of natures whose heights he cannot attain. He is friendly, but only like someone who lets himself go without letting himself really flow out; and just when he is standing in front of people who really do flow out, he will act all the more cold and reserved, – at times like this, his eye is like a smooth and unwilling lake that will no longer allow a single ripple of joy or sympathy. The worst and most dangerous thing that a scholar is capable of doing comes from his type’s instinct for mediocrity: from that Jesuitism of mediocrity that instinctively works towards the annihilation of the exceptional man and tries to break every taut bow or – even better! – to unbend it. Unbending it with consideration, and, of course, a gentle hand –, unbending it with friendly pity: that is the true art of Jesuitism, which has always known how to introduce itself as a religion of pity. –

Beyond Good & Evil paragraph 206

NLP is not a science and anyone dumb enough, and this counts double for NLP trainers, to claim that NLP is scientific, is only making NLP into a pseudoscience. The best we, the NLP community, can do is do protoscientific research into how good NLP works. Nevertheless, it is important that NLP trainers never contradict the findings of NLP. Nor do the opposite and make all kinds of pseudoscientific claims that supposedly support NLP.

Apparent toleration. – You speak fair words about science, but! – I see behind your toleration of science! In a corner of your heart you believe, all this notwithstanding, that you do not need it, that you are being magnanimous in according it recognition, in being indeed its advocate, especially since science does not exhibit the same magnanimity in regard to your views on life. Do you realize that you have no right whatever to this exercise of toleration? that this gracious demeanor is a cruder insult to science than the open mockery of it which some arrogant priest or artist permits himself? You lack the strict conscience for what is true and actual, it does not torment you to find science in conflict with your feelings, you do not know a greedy longing for knowledge as a law ruling over you, you do not feel it as a duty to desire to be present as a witness wherever knowledge is present and to let nothing already known escape again. You do not know that which you treat so tolerantly! And it is only because you do not know it that you are able to adopt so gracious a demeanor! You, precisely you would glare in bitter and fanatical hostility if science should ever look you straight in the face with its eyes! – What do we care, then, if you practice toleration – towards a phantom! and not even towards us! And what do we matter!

Daybreak paragraph 270

It is very important that a NLP practitioner is able to listen and see very well. When you work with other people in the way they tell you about their problem linguistically in most cases they also tell you what the solution is. At the same time there are many unconscious movement in their physiology that give away a lot more information about what is the case.

I put forward at once — lest I break with my style, which is affirmative and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily — the three tasks for which educators are required. One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see — accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to “will” — to be able to suspend decision. All unspirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the inability to resist a stimulus: one must react, one follows every impulse. In many cases, such a compulsion is already pathology, decline, a symptom of exhaustion — almost everything that unphilosophical crudity designates with the word “vice” is merely this physiological inability not to react. A practical application of having learned to see: as a learner, one will have become altogether slow, mistrustful, recalcitrant. One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one’s hand. To have all doors standing open, to lie servilely on one’s stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into, others and other things — in short, the famous modern “objectivity” — is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence.

Twilight of the Idols, What The Germans Lack, paragraph 6

NLP is inherently anti-systemic. If you ever find a NLP system it is wrong.

There are schematic minds, who hold a complex of thought to be truer if it can be inscribed into schemata or tables of categories drawn up beforehand. The self-deceptions in this field are countless: almost all great ‘systems’ are among them. The fundamental prejudice is, though, that it is inherent to the true being of things to be ordered, easy to survey, systematic; conversely, that disorder, chaos, the unpredictable can only make its appearance in a world that is false or incompletely known – in short, that it is an error – which is a moral prejudice, drawn from the fact that the truthful, reliable human being is a man of order, of maxims, and all in all tends to be something predictable and pedantic. And yet it cannot be demonstrated at all that the in-themselves of things follows this recipe for the model civil servant.

Notebook 40, August – September 1885 paragraph 9

One of the things that struck Richard Bandler at an early age was that people explained away the results of the great therapists like Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson by claiming that they were gifted. This motivated Richard Bandler to show the world that great skills are learnable.

Talent. – In as highly developed a humanity as ours now is everyone acquires from nature access to many talents. Everyone possesses inborn talent, but few possess the degree of inborn and acquired toughness, endurance and energy actually to become a talent, that is to say to become what he is: which means to discharge it in works and actions.

Human, All Too Human part 1, paragraph 263

The serious workman. – Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquire greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole. The recipe for becoming a good novelist, for example, is easy to give, but to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says ‘I do not have enough talent.’ One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes each day until one has learned how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate, keeping one’s eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those present, one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer; one should excerpt for oneself out of the individual sciences everything that will produce an artistic effect when it is well described, one should, finally, reflect on the motives of human actions, disdain no signpost to instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue in this many-sided exercise some ten years: what is then created in the workshop, however, will be fit to go out into the world. – What, however, do most people do? They begin, not with the parts, but with the whole. Perhaps they chance to strike a right note, excite attention and from then on strike worse and worse notes, for good, natural reasons. – Sometimes, when the character and intellect needed to formulate such a life-plan are lacking, fate and need take their place and lead the future master step by step through all the stipulations of his trade.

Human, All Too Human part 1, paragraph 163

Often a lot of stuff is being sold as “NLP” whereas in reality it has very little to do with NLP. For that reason it is very important to investigate any NLP trainer quite well before committing to participate in a NLP training programme.

Our teachers. – In our youth we take our teachers and guides from the time in which we happen to live and the circle in which we happen to move: we are thoughtlessly confident that the times we live in are bound to have teachers better suited to us than to anyone else and that we are bound to find them without much trouble. For this childishness we have in later years to pay a heavy price: we have to expiate our teachers in ourself. We then perhaps go in search of our true guides throughout the whole world, the world of the past included ­but perhaps it is too late. And in the worst case we discover that they were living when we were young – and that we missed them.

Daybreak paragraph 495

One of Richard Bandler’s more recent ideas about NLP is that NLP is thinking on purpose.

In the form in which it comes, a thought is a sign with many meanings, requiring interpretation or, more precisely, an arbitrary narrowing and restriction before it finally becomes clear. It arises in me – where from? How? I don’t know. It comes, independently of my will, usually circled about and clouded by a crowd of feelings, desires, aversions, and by other thoughts, often enough scarcely distinguishable from a ‘willing’ or ‘feeling’. It is drawn out of this crowd, cleaned, set on its feet, watched as it stands there, moves about, all this at an amazing speed yet without any sense of haste. Who does all this I don’t know, and I am certainly more observer than author of the process. Then its case is tried, the question posed: ‘What does it mean? What is it allowed to mean? Is it right or wrong?’ – the help of other thoughts is called on, it is compared. In this way thinking proves to be almost a kind of exercise and act of justice, where there is a judge, an opposing party, even an examination of the witnesses which I am permitted to observe for a while- only a while, to be sure: most of the process, it seems, escapes me. – That every thought first arrives many-meaninged and floating, really only as the occasion for attempts to interpret or for arbitrarily fixing it, that a multitude of persons seem to participate in all thinking – this is not particularly easy to observe: fundamentally, we are trained the opposite way, not to think about thinking as we think. The origin of the thought remains hidden; in all probability it is only the symptom of a much more comprehensive state; the fact that it, and not another, is the one to come, that it comes with precisely this greater or lesser luminosity, sometimes sure and imperious, sometimes weak and in need of support, as a whole always exciting, questioning – because every thought acts as a stimulus to consciousness – in all of this, something of our total state expresses itself in sign form. – The same is true of every feeling. It does not mean something in itself: when it comes it first has to be interpreted by us, and how strange this interpretation often is! Think of the distress of the entrails, almost ‘unconscious’ to us, of the tensions of blood pressure in the abdomen, of the pathological states of the nervus sympathicus – and how many things there are of which the sensorium commune gives us hardly a gleam of consciousness! – Faced with such uncertain feelings of displeasure, only the expert anatomist can guess the right type and location of their causes, whereas everyone else, in other words almost all men for as long as they have existed, searches not for a physical explanation of this kind of pain but for a psychological and moral one. They misconstrue the body’s actual ill humors by fetching from their store of unpleasant experiences and fears a reason to feel so bad. Under torture, almost anyone confesses himself guilty; under a pain whose physical cause is unknown, the tortured man subjects himself to an interrogation as long and inquisitorial as it takes to find himself or others guilty: – like, for example, the Puritan who, as a matter of habit, made a moral interpretation of the ill humor resulting from an unwise lifestyle: as the pangs of his own conscience.

Notebook 38, June – July 1885 paragraph 1