This page provides the links to the backnumber issues of the newsletter written in Japanese by Taiten Kitaoka, a Japanese NLP trainer/facilitator. Note: This "provocative" title of the newsletter is meant to suggest that Taiten Kitaoka's NLP work is the first attempt for the integrated NLP in the Japanese market. It is not meant to claim that his NLP work is genuine in a more general sense. ************************************************************************ Issue #3: 2003.11.14. 'This is the Genuine NLP!' ************************************************************************ The author, who has been formally trained by the four most important co-developers of NLP (Grinder, Bandler, Dilts, and DeLozier) will send newsletters containing a variety of information concerning the advanced communication psychology/ pragmatic psychology known as NLP. ************************************************************************ "Principles, Philosophy, and Raisons d'etre of NLP" Hello everybody! I am Taiten Kitaoka, a Japanese NLP trainer/facilitator. I wrote in the previous issue of this newsletter that I would try to cover the principles, philosophy and 'raisons d'etre' of NLP in my own way in the next issue of the newsletter, and this topic will thus be discussed in the current issue. Of course, such a global topic may not be wholly covered in this newsletter where writing space is limited, and I therefore would like to go into the epistemological background of NLP in a summarising way: First of all, whenever NLP is talked about, a certain tendency is very evident not only in Japan, but even in the professional community of NLP practitioners in Western countries. Namely, only one of the two "Fathers of NLP" tends to be paid special and exclusive attention to; in other words, among these two Fathers, Gregory Bateson and Milton H Erickson, only Erickson's achievements and hypnotic techniques (i.e., the "Ericksonian Hypnosis"), as well as the therapeutic effects of the two other prominent therapists, Fritz Pearls, Founder of Gestalt Therapy, and Virginia Satir, a family therapist, have tended to be comprehensively discussed and to be introduced in a number of NLP related books. On the other hand, with regard to the work and the influence on NLP on the part of Bateson, very curious "silence" has, in practice, been persisting. The reasons why the main focus has been directed to the achievements of such therapists as Erickson, Pearls and Satir, as the background of NLP, seem to be 1) that NLP has initially been developed as a new alternative school of therapy, and 2) that, in order to explain away the instantaneous and practical effects of each of the NLP techniques, which sometimes flabbergast both NLP practitioners and their clients, it appears to be very convenient to make reference to the therapeutic achievements of these effective therapists. On the other hand, probably for the reason that there are only a very few people who are ready to study the quite abstruse books by Bateson including "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", it must be rather natural that there has been almost no opportunity for the fathomless influence of this "epistemological giant of the twentieth century" on NLP to be discussed and analysed in detail. However, since the fact that a certain thing is not discussed at all does not necessarily mean that the very thing itself does not exist, I would like to take advantage of this opportunity to summarize below the deep influence on NLP on the part of Bateson and his epistemology: Gregory Bateson (1904 - 80) was Professor at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), Kresge College, during the early 70's, and Grinder and Bandler were studying under him at the time. It was Bateson who urged these two would-be NLP co-developers to go to Phoenix in Arizona, to study a very weird old psychiatrist who can cure even severely mentally disturbed patients in a very unique way, using hypnosis. This strange hypnotherapist was, of course, Erickson. Bateson was a son of William Bateson, an outstanding British biologist, who coined the very term "Genetics", one of whose concepts, DNA, has been a central topic of modern science. He became an anthropologist and studied communicational patterns in New Guinea and Bali. He was married to another anthropologist, Margaret Mead. He later conducted research in psychiatry at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, USA, and contributed to the formation of the theory of schizophrenia in the 50's. It has since been proven that the notions of his theories such as "Double Bind" and "Logical Types" are not limited to cases of schizophrenia but have an universal applicability to human communication in general. What is important in his research is the discovery that, contrary to common sense, the difference between schizophrenics and "normal" human beings is not absolute but rather relative; namely, both are governed by the same principles of mentation, but a minor error in applying these principles makes a big difference; this is well shown in the example of "syllogism in grass" used by schizophrenics. Namely: Syllogism Syllogism in Grass Men die; Grass dies; Socrates is a man; Men die; Socrates will die. Men are grass. Notice that a "minor" error in syllogism thus creates "insane" people. Specifically, Bateson's "Theory of Logical Types" is one of the most important concepts underlying the content-free methodology of NLP. In other words, it is on the basis of this theory that the most important principle of NLP is born, namely, that "a problem (the content) can never be solved by the mind operating on the same level as the one where it was created. For it to be solved, a mind operating on a higher level (e.g., the level of the context) than the problem is required." This theory of logical types is summarised in "Change" (1974) written by Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland and Richard Fisch of the "Palo Alto Group" under the clinical guidance of Don Jackson and the theoretical guidance of Gregory Bateson (the Palo Alto Group is synonymous with the group of researchers working at the Mental Research Institute mentioned above), and its essential axiom is "whatever involves all of a collection must not be one of the collection"; namely, a class (consisting of specific members) cannot be a member of itself. For example, the human race consists of all the human beings there are, but the human race itself is not a human being. A "logical typing miss" here will produce, for instance, confusion between the map and the territory, or make a schizophrenic eat the menu instead of the food which is described on it. Incidentally, I find that Watzlawick is one of the best communication analysts. It is extremely surprising that in the book "Pragmatics of Human Communication" published in 1967 (over 35 years ago) and dedicated to Bateson, the authors, i.e., Watzlawick, Janet Bavelas and Jackson, succeeded in elucidating and modelling practically all the basic human communication patterns. This book is definitely one of the "must" books for any serious researchers of human communication. This book was a great influence in the birth of NLP. Watzlawick may not have initiated any new theories/models, but, for instance, his contribution to the application of the models about schizophrenic communication patterns to general human communication should be greatly appreciated. Among other things, in "Pragmatics", "Change", etc., he expounded the Batesonian models, including the Theory of Logical Types and the Double Bind Theory, as rather universal communication patterns in human daily life. I consider the Palo Alto Group and NLP to be mutually in a sister/brother relationship under the parenthood of Bateson. The importance of the Palo Alto Group should not be underestimated, all the more because it was Jay Haley, who was a member of the group, that introduced the work of Erickson to the world for the first time (Erickson had been completely unknown in both the lay and professional communities and had remained ignored until then), and also because it was this group that established the methods of "Brief Therapy", which has become quite well known in Japan. By the way, Bateson declared in his posthumous book, "Angels Fear", that the problems proposed by Aristotle 2,500 years ago, and compounded by Descartes, have been already solved by his and/or Bertrand Russell's epistemology. Although he was humble enough to add that after these problems have been solved, new problems will be created, this declaration indicates an awesome fact that such philosophical problems as the mind/body split, which have not been solved despite endless arguments made by an infinite number of old and new philosophers both in the East and the West for the last 25 centuries, have finally been solved once and for all! In other words, it can be claimed that NLP, which was born on the basis of Bateson's teaching, has enabled a "quantum leap" that humanity has not been able to achieve for the last 2,500 years, i.e., a previously unbridgeable leap from the content level to the context level. In connection with "Russell's epistemology" mentioned above, it is important to point out here that Bateson's theory of logical types was originally introduced by Russell and Alfred N. Whitehead in their "Principia Mathematica" written between 1910 and 1913. This book has a few thousand pages, and is abstruse. I intend to read it one day, but a Cambridge graduate mathematician, who was my acquaintance, said to me that even English speaking professional mathematicians and philosophers have difficulty in reading it, and that it would be a waste of time if I decided to read it. Of course, if you decide to go back to the roots of this British epistemological tradition, you are bound to reach the British Empiricism of the 17th and 18th centuries, comprising Locke, Berkeley and Hume. I do hope that the readers of this issue of the newsletter may understand that NLP is not an opportunistic and/or eclectic technical school which has collected already existing concepts and techniques at random and in a superficial way, but that it is a totally revolutionary and coherent methodology which is based on at least 2,500 years of metaphysical trials and errors of all kinds, and has integrated and transcended them all. How did you find this current issue of the newsletter? If you have questions and feedback, please contact me at magazine@creativity.co.uk. Go to Taiten Kitaoka's Official Web site. Go to the site in English: Taiten Kitaoka's Newsletter: "This is the Genuine NLP!". Go to the site in Japanese: Taiten Kitaoka's Newsletter:"". (c) Copyright 2003, Taiten Kitaoka. All rights reserved.