My experience with NLP has been two-fold.
My first exposure, in the early 1980s, was in the context of discussions of the many schools of psychotherapy that were flourishing around that time. NLP shared many of the techniques described by Fritz Perls’s “gestalt therapy”, by which my now wife, then a psych student, was very impressed.
By the late 1980s, the proven therapeutic and cost effectiveness of psychopharmacology (critics may say of it what they will, but tens of times as many people now have access to at least
some form of psychotherapy now than did prior to the “Prozac revolution”) had caused cognitive therapeutic approaches to fall into disrespect in clinical psychiatry and psychology, although these approaches continue to be developed and used in such setting as relationship counseling and corporate teambuilding training.
In 1996, I encountered the use of the term “Neuro-lingusitic hacking” in Neil Stephenson’s now-classic work of fiction,
“Snow Crash”. This was a completely different use of the term, referring to the computer-assisted accessing of deep language processing structure in the human brain. I can do no justice to the novel’s ideas in this short post, and encourage readers unfamiliar with the novel to read the above wikipedia link, and better still, read it.
Due to the popularity of Stephenson and “Snow Crash”, I suspect that more people now think of NLP in the fictional sense used there than in its historic sense. Despite its fictional nature, the NLP of “Snow Crash” appears to me to better scientifically grounded than the non-fictional one.
