NLP Co-founders

NLP was started by John Grinder, a linguistic professor, and Richard Bandler, a mathematician, at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), around 1975.

At the time, Grinder and Bandler were students of Gregory Bateson, a British born psychologist and anthropologist teaching at UCSC. Bateson and Milton H. Erickson, the most important hypnotherapist, are the two figures who gave the biggest influence to the birth of NLP.

Bandler was then deeply involved in Gestalt Therapy, and modelled Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt. NLP was born when Grinder and Bandler published, in 1975, their first book entitled "The Structure of Magic, I", in which they presented a set of explicit tools, by means of which one can achieve the excellent performance level of such therapeutic wizards as Perls, as well as Erickson and Virginia Satir, an authority of family therapy.

Since then, Bandler has invented "brief therapy" type techniques which cure severe phobias and/or get schizophrenics back to social life. His main contribution is the invention (or rather discovery) of "submodalities techniques", and his recent work is based on the combination of these techniques and hypnosis. When Guhen Kitaoka was trained and trained as NLP trainer by Richard Bandler in Munich in 1995, his personal discussions with Bandler revealed that his "submodalities techniques" are based on his own long study of holography, and its application to how our brain functions.

John Grinder was a transformational linguist, and, in Guhen's opinion, considerably contributed to the theoretical development of NLP. This orientation of his was made particularly clear when Grinder and Judith DeLozier held a series of their joint workshops entitled "Prerequisites to Personal Genius" at the end of the 80's. (A transcript of part of this series is found in "Turtles all the Way Down".) In their workshops, Grinder presented a series of "Personal Editing" techniques which are extremely powerful tools for changing our mental patterns, enabling us to achieve what we really want.