John Grinder and Richard Bandler are considered the co-founders of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. In 1971, John Grinder earned a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, San Diego, and was hired as an assistant professor in the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Linguistics Department. He collaborated with the eminent linguist Noam Chomsky and concentrated his research on Chomsky’s transformational grammar theories. In 1971, Richard Bandler was a talented 21-year-old senior at UC Santa Cruz majoring in psychology. Students were permitted to direct seminars under the supervision of a professor at the time, and in 1972, Bandler asked Grinder to supervise the gestalt therapy groups he was leading. Grinder’s agreement to oversee the seminars was one of those greatest moments in history.
Bandler was mainly taken with Frederick (Fritz) Perls’s (1893-1970) gestalt therapy. He first started to study Perls’ work in 1972, when he was employed by a publishing industry of Science and Behavior Books, to create transcripts of films of Perls’ lectures and workshops for the book ‘The Gestalt Approach and Eyewitness to Therapy’. Gestalt therapy, as developed by Perls, is centered on experience, notably the present moment, and on the clarity of language. It highlights the significance of language in shaping an individual’s experience and expression of reality.
Bandler possessed exceptional behavioral modeling abilities: he possessed an amazing ability to copy the behavior and mannerisms of others. He also has substantial knowledge of contemporary psychotherapeutic systems. Bandler discovered that he could duplicate Perls’ therapeutic language patterns as he worked with Perls’ papers and countless video and audio clips. In 1973, Dr. Robert Sptizer, proprietor of Science and Behavior Books, requested Bandler to record and transcribe a month-long workshop given by renowned family therapist Virginia Satir. Bandler was also able to accurately recreate her voice and behavioral characteristics. Soon after, Bandler was able to conduct gestalt groups and affect change in the same way as Perls and Satir did.
Bandler, on the other hand, was disappointed by his lack of success in teaching others how to accomplish what he did. He requested assistance from Grinder in determining what he was doing (the meta-patterns) in order to impart his skills to others. Grinder possessed exceptional modeling abilities as a result of his linguistics studies. He explained to Bandler that if he taught Grinder the necessary behavioral skills, Grinder would assist him in reproducing them. “If you teach me how to do what you’re doing,” he stated, “then I’ll tell you what you’re doing.” This partnership marked the birth of the new field of Neuro- Linguistic Programming or what is famous as NLP.
Grinder and Bandler were both dissatisfied with psychotherapists’ and psychoanalysts’ theories and talk therapy. Bandler’s original creative inspiration arose from his frustration with the psychological models he was studying at UCSC and his curiosity with the policy implications he observed in Fritz Perls’ gestalt therapy and Virginia Satir’s family therapy. Grinder was influenced by his master, Noam Chomsky’s, Marxist political ideas and had been interested in leftist politics. Psychotherapy, he believed, was the self-indulgence of the bourgeoisie wallowing in their woes. He desired a more realistic method of implementing change. As such, he shared Chomsky’s interest in more applied cognitive psychology, which examined the ways information is processed.
In the early 1970s, computer programming and the concepts that underpin it became accessible to non-specialists. People have increasingly drawn similarities between both the mind and the computer. The creators of NLP were not concerned with psychological theories; they desired to understand how not why.
As Grinder stated, “the main question in ………………. NLP modeling is: Given a genius, what are the differences that distinguish his or her behavior from that of skilled personnel in the same field?” Grinder and Bandler chose several contemporary geniuses in the fields of behavioral communication and therapy as role models. They began with verbal communication because of Grinder’s linguistics background. They listened to and watched videotapes of Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir together.
Bandler and Grinder were neighbors and acquaintances of Gregory Bateson, a prominent anthropologist and social scientist, and his famous wife, Margaret Mead, during this time period. Bateson compared the mind to a biological ecosystem, in which all living organisms and all components of the physical world coexist and function as a unified whole. He stressed the significance of knowing how ideas interact in society in his concept of the “ecology of mind.” Bateson’s systems theory had a significant influence on the NLP founders’ concept of the “ecology” of change, which entailed determining how a change in a person’s image of the world would affect other parts of his or her life. Bateson supplied the Foreword to Grinder and Bandler’s groundbreaking first publication, The Structure of Magic-first volume.
Gregory Bateson informed Grinder in late 1974 about the hypnotic techniques developed by his long-time colleague, psychiatrist Milton Erickson. Grinder and Bandler came to Phoenix, Arizona in 1975 on Bateson’s recommendation to attend Erickson’s lectures and observe his work with patients. Their visit with Erickson had a tremendous effect on their subsequent study.
Therefore, early NLP was significantly influenced by Noam Chomsky’s cognitive psychology, Fritz Perls’s gestalt therapy, Virginia Satir’s family therapy Gregory Bateson’s systems theory, and Milton Erickson’s hypnotherapy.