Leslie Cameron Bandler once spent a weekend in a deep trance identification with Virginia Satir. Steve Gilligan did the same with Milton Erickson. I don't know how much that weekend is responsible for Gilligan's skills in Ericksonian hypnosis, but I do know that it had a profound effect on Leslie. (Among other things, she lost the harsh Oklahoma accent I have been told she previously had.)

I believe that one of the primary goals of Leslie's teaching was to do something similar with her students. A lot of people in the first training I took complained about her lack of organization and the amount of time she would spend telling stories about clients she had worked with and about her own childhood. A few years later, though, I realized that I what I had learned from Leslie stayed with me much better than what more disciplined NLP teachers had taught, and that what I learned from Leslie was much more important.

I realized that there was now a little part of Leslie in me. I had learned a little of her way of thinking and --- especially --- her attitudes, her curiosity about people. I found that now, when for instance I encountered some especially obnoxious person, instead of just thinking ``What an asshole!'' I would think ``I wonder what causes that person to behave in a way that seems to only cause him pain. I wonder what one could do to help him find a more useful type of behavior?''

This comes back to the question of how much stress one should put on therapy as a science and how much on therapy as an art. To me, expecting a student to become a good therapist by spending years in graduate school learning statistics and reading journals is like expecting a person to become a good musician by reading books on musicology.

There are certain fairly standard ways of learning an art. One important thing is to spend a lot of time watching other performers and trying to identify with them. It used to be that musicians who were serious about their craft would devote a lot of time and money to going to performances by good musicians, sometimes needing to travel for the purpose. Now, the availability of recordings makes things much easier.

The invention of videotape (and even audiotape) offers similar opportunities to a therapist. Leslie Cameron Bandler will apparently never teach again, but there are two excellent videotapes showing her working with clients. (One of these is reviewed in my nlp archive in the file named tape.leslie.) These tapes are worth watching over and over again. They give a therapist the opportunity to learn a little of Leslie's art, whether or not one agrees with her approach to therapy. I know that good videotapes are also available of Virginia Satir and Richard Bandler.

I am shocked that John Grohol's university does not have videotapes available for its students of therapy. In my opinion, for a student of therapy not to have the opportunity to watch the work of really superb therapists is comparable to a jazz musician never having had the opportunity to hear Miles Davis or John Coltrane. A music school without a good library of recordings could not be taken seriously. I hope that within a few years it will become equally unacceptable for a program in clinical or counseling psychology not to have videotapes of outstanding therapists available for its students to study.