The History of NLP by Wolfgang Volker

Richard Bandler’s Early Life

Richard Wayne Bandler was born in 1950 in New Jersey. A few years later, his family moved to California, where he grew up in one of the poorest parts of San Jose, in the Bay Area, north of San Francisco. In the mid-1960s, Bandler was one of the long-haired flower children often seen on the streets of America’s West Coast cities. As an active member of the protesting hippie community, he helped organize some of the biggest rock concerts of that era.

These times were marked by a negative attitude toward tradition. The materialistic foundation of American society, the increasingly absurd escalation of the arms race, and U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam conflict led to an oppositional movement that rejected the norms of a success-driven society. Many young people saw the solution to the era’s most pressing problems in radical individualism and a reevaluation of values. Instead of homeland, family, and success, the new slogans were love, peace, and personal happiness. This approach to life was expressed through escaping cities, drug experiences, religious mysticism, and, above all, new rock music.

The summer of 1967—known as the Summer of Love—was the peak of the so-called West Coast music scene, featuring legendary acts like The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, The Steve Miller Band, The Byrds, Country Joe and the Fish, Janis Joplin, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Thousands gathered outdoors to listen to these now-legendary bands and, under the influence of psychedelic drugs like LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and hashish, celebrate the peaceful revolution of the Flower Power movement.

This cultural revolution reached its climax at the iconic Woodstock festival. In September 1969, nearly half a million people gathered on the East Coast for the first time in history to celebrate the dawn of a new era of love, harmony, and peace. Everything seemed possible. The dream ended abruptly on December 6, 1969, when a member of the Hells Angels killed 18-year-old Meredith Hunter in front of the stage during a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway near San Francisco, marking the end of the Woodstock Nation dream.

Bandler’s Path to Therapy and Academia

In 1967, the youth’s faith in the future and belief in changing the world was still unbroken. Becky, the wife of renowned psychiatrist and publisher Robert S. Spitzer, noticed the remarkable talents of 17-year-old Richard Bandler, whom she had hired to teach her son Dan to play drums. Becky was impressed by Bandler’s openness to philosophical questions and his unique teaching style.

The Spitzers supported Bandler’s abilities. Robert Spitzer described him as exceptionally skilled and multi-talented, entrusting him with various tasks at his publishing house, including preparing audio and video recordings for therapeutic seminars.

Bandler began his academic career with two years at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills. According to Spitzer, he often drove his professors to despair, refusing to compromise even on minor details and not conforming to academic rituals. After college, Bandler enrolled at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Spitzers, who became increasingly influential mentors, allowed him to build a small house on their property near Santa Cruz, where he lived for a while with his girlfriend and dog.

Santa Cruz, a small town on the north side of Monterey Bay, south of San Francisco, was home to a vibrant cultural scene and many notable figures, including director Alfred Hitchcock, actress Shirley Temple, science fiction author Frank Herbert, and members of Santana and The Doobie Brothers. Richard Alpert (later known as Baba Ram Dass), a former Harvard colleague of Timothy Leary, also lived there, as did Gregory Bateson, the creator of cybernetic epistemology and a key figure in holistic worldviews. Santa Cruz was, and still is, considered a special “power place” in esoteric circles, known for its diverse spiritual and personal growth activities.

Encounter with Gestalt Therapy

Bandler initially took courses in philosophy, mathematics, and computer science, but his interests soon shifted toward the behavioral sciences, especially new therapeutic methods like Rolfing, family therapy, and, most notably, the work of Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy. In December 1969, Perls signed a contract with Robert Spitzer to write several books on the philosophy and psychotherapeutic practice of Gestalt therapy. Perls intended these books to be accessible to educated laypeople and to include transcripts of films showing him at work, believing these would provide key insights into the therapeutic process. Unfortunately, Perls’ unexpected death in 1970 put the project in jeopardy. After his students declined to help, Spitzer turned to Bandler in 1972.

Bandler was tasked with selecting and transcribing introductory Gestalt sessions by Perls. He became so immersed in the work that he began to speak and act like Perls. The first publication was Perls’ unfinished manuscript, The Gestalt Approach, followed by Eye Witness to Therapy, mostly consisting of film transcripts. Two years later, Bandler published Legacy from Fritz, a collection of selected transcripts. Although Bandler never met Perls personally, his work on these publications clearly influenced him.

The First Groups (1972–1973)

In the early 1970s, UC Santa Cruz had an exceptionally liberal atmosphere, especially at Kresge College, where Gregory Bateson worked. Experimental group activities were encouraged. In spring 1972, Bandler, dissatisfied with the academic curriculum, organized Gestalt therapy practice sessions at Kresge College, taking advantage of a system that allowed senior students to plan and conduct their own classes. These sessions, focused on Gestalt theory, were a novelty in the behaviorist-oriented curriculum. While there were groups exploring human experience, they were mainly based on Carl Rogers’ client-centered therapy, a key part of the humanistic psychology movement. Bandler’s group, however, was unique in its focus on analyzing the therapeutic impact of Gestalt theory within a group setting and developing practical skills.

Collaboration with John Grinder

John Grinder, ten years Bandler’s senior, became the supervisor of his Gestalt therapy seminar group. Born in Michigan in 1939, Grinder had worked as a CIA agent in Europe before becoming known for his work in transformational grammar under Noam Chomsky and as an assistant professor of linguistics under Gregory Bateson at Kresge College. Although new to therapy, Grinder quickly recognized Bandler’s extraordinary therapeutic abilities. Their collaboration led to the rapid formation of new Gestalt groups, with Bandler initially leading and then introducing Grinder to the process. Grinder learned to model Bandler’s techniques, and soon both were running their own groups, using a process called “modeling” to transfer specific skills from one person to another through systematic observation and analysis.

Modeling had previously been used in sales training in the U.S., but Bandler and Grinder were the first to apply it to therapeutic communication. Grinder contributed his linguistic expertise and modeling experience, while Bandler brought knowledge of modern therapeutic schools and a talent for accurately mimicking others’ behavior. Their experimental groups soon became a fixture in Santa Cruz’s group activity scene, described in Terrence McClendon’s book The Wild Days: NLP 1972–1981. Bandler’s energetic drive was a key factor in the group’s success, often summed up by his motto: “GO FOR IT … NOW!!!”

Meeting Virginia Satir

Bandler met Virginia Satir, creator of Conjoint Family Therapy, through the Spitzers. Satir was a leading figure at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto. Bandler first met her in 1972 at the Spitzers’ country house, where he lived. He was deeply impressed by her therapeutic skills and soon began attending her training programs, often handling audio and video recordings. Satir introduced tools like the “Parts Party” and “Family Reconstruction,” which Bandler incorporated into his own group work. Satir herself described Bandler as a brilliant, inquisitive young man with a fantastic intellect, eager to understand the causes of change. Bandler’s exposure to Satir’s methods, along with his work on Perls’ publications, led him to seek out other influential therapists, including Milton Erickson.

The Birth of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)

The Meta Model Groups

In early 1974, Bandler and Grinder launched the Meta Model project, which became the foundation of NLP. Their group, meeting at a student house on Mission Street in Santa Cruz, focused on methods for gathering information. The core group included future NLP luminaries such as Leslie Cameron (later Bandler’s wife), Judith DeLozier (who married Grinder), Frank Pucelik, Byron Lewis, David Gordon, Steve Gilligan, Maribeth Anderson, Jim Eicher, Paul Carter, Terrence McClendon, and Robert Dilts. The group explored couples counseling, Gestalt therapy, and “family sculpting,” another method developed by Satir.

The group’s research was based on the assumption that, aside from body-oriented methods, verbal communication between therapist and client is central to all therapeutic work. They identified specific language patterns in the communication styles of Perls and Satir that indicated problem processes and triggered change. Grinder’s linguistic expertise was crucial in defining and testing these patterns. Their findings were published in 1975 in The Structure of Magic, which laid the groundwork for a model that allowed for systematic information gathering about a person’s worldview. They also succeeded in modeling and describing the essential language skills of Perls and Satir in successful therapist-client communication. The combination of Bandler’s therapeutic training and Grinder’s linguistic knowledge resulted in one of the most significant works on human communication.

During the Meta Model project, Bandler and Grinder maintained an active dialogue with Satir and Bateson. Bandler moved to Acorn Hollow, where the Spitzers owned land that became a hub for talented therapists and artists, including the Batesons. Acorn Hollow became an intellectual center, reflected in the forewords to The Structure of Magic written by Bateson and Satir. Satir praised Bandler and Grinder for identifying the elements that drive change in communication and for providing practical methods for facilitating change.

Meeting Milton Erickson

Bandler and Grinder became interested in hypnosis after noticing that their clients’ behavior during guided fantasies closely resembled descriptions of trance states. Gregory Bateson introduced them to Milton Erickson, the founder of modern hypnotherapy. Despite his declining health, Erickson lived in Phoenix, Arizona, where he taught students from around the world. Starting in late 1974, Bandler and Grinder visited Erickson multiple times, recording his sessions and studying his writings and transcripts provided by Erickson and his student Ernest Rossi. They analyzed Erickson’s micro-patterns of behavior, finding in him a master of communication strategies that produced change.

By the second half of 1974, Bandler and Grinder began organizing seminars on therapeutic change and the structure of hypnotic communication, focusing on the linguistic patterns of Erickson. As with their studies of Satir and Perls, they identified and systematized Erickson’s language patterns, developing what became known as the Milton Model. Their work was published in 1975 by their own Meta Publications, promoting literature on the new field of “neuro-linguistic programming” (NLP).

The Groups of 1974 and 1975

The early stages of NLP’s development were heavily influenced by the study of Erickson’s work. Many previous ideas about psychotherapy were abandoned in favor of Erickson’s pragmatic, goal-oriented approach. The focus shifted from the notion of the therapist as a warm, authentic, and empathetic figure to experimenting with various forms of communicative behavior. From 1974 onward, the guiding principle became: “If what you’re doing isn’t working, do something else!”

The main goal of the groups in 1974 and 1975 was to develop formal models for communication processes, with special attention to the nonverbal behavior of Perls, Satir, and Erickson. Nonverbal communication was seen as a crucial part of therapeutic influence. Erickson had already demonstrated the power of nonverbal contact in facilitating client change. Bandler and Grinder aimed to create models that would help analyze and represent the structure of effective nonverbal therapeutic communication.

This period marked the real beginning of the NLP project: creating general models of communication, subjective experience, and change. Bandler and Grinder hoped these models would make it possible to accurately represent the structures of change-producing communication. The goal was to develop patterns based on a formal description of what therapeutic “magicians” like Perls, Satir, and Erickson actually did, rather than what they thought they did.

These models were never intended to be limited to psychotherapy. They were designed to be applicable to all communication processes. Because they originated in therapeutic work, NLP is often seen as a new form of psychotherapy, but its models are fundamentally structured to model any human experience or behavior. The communication techniques and change methods taught in NLP courses are essentially applications of these models in specific areas of human interaction.

The first outlines of NLP’s main model, the so-called “4-Tuple” or Four-Tuple Model, appeared at the end of 1974. Using this model, researchers began exploring altered states of consciousness, shifting the focus from psychotherapy to the structure of change-inducing communication and the nature of subjective experience. Experiments included not only the methods of Perls and Satir but also trance induction techniques, Erickson’s hypnotic language patterns, and indirect metaphorical communication. Deep trance phenomena such as positive and negative hallucinations, time distortion, amnesia, analgesia, age regression, hand levitation, and catalepsy were studied in detail. The first successful NLP patterns emerged, and the results of this intensive experimental phase were published in three books that remain foundational NLP literature, presenting models for shaping behavior, experience, and new forms of intervention.

Wolfgang Volker, “NLP Project: The Source Code”