The name is Neurolinguistic Programming. NLP has just become a common acronym. I think perhaps you meant to say that NLP has nothing to do with the academic discipline of Neurolinguistics, which deals with the neurological study of speech, especially speech pathologies. The confusion is unfortunate. Strangely enough, I've been told that one of the founders of NLP, John Grinder, while at Rockefeller University knew the person who eventually started the field Neurolinguistics.

Your second sentence is essentially true, at least as to the origins of the term. Some NLPers now find the name very apt, some people hate it. In any case, ``programming'' has to do with teaching people to program themselves rather than some cultish form of indoctrination.

>The basic idea of NLP is to create a body of therapeutic techniques by
>using techiques shown to work. It's attempted to be entirely eclectic, but
>draws heavily on social constructivism, Bateson, Watzlawick, Milton Erickson
>and Virginia Satir.
>
>IMHO, it seems as if NLP is best on problems that are fairly easy to
>cure.

Hm... Well, in a way you could say this is almost true by definition. NLP is extremely brief therapy, so if a problem can be cured by NLP then it is fairly easy to cure (using NLP). Some of the problems NLP can deal with were once considered very difficult, though. Even phobias are things that people once used to spend years in psychoanalysis on.

Some of the things that some NLPers claim to be able to deal with are obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress syndrome (many claim that this can be often handled in a single session), and codependence. A lot of therapists don't consider these to be easy problems. (Of course most therapists also don't accept the effectiveness of NLP for these problems. But very few of the skeptics have actually tried NLP out.)

> Some NLP practitioners claim that they can cure a phobia in 15
>minutes, which is impressive; I've seen a 16-year old girl cured of
>anorexia by a systems oriented therapist in 30 minutes, that's much _more_
>impressive.

Indeed so! Of course, for both NLP and systems-oriented therapy, a cure of a single subject is not proof of general effectiveness. But I suspect that a lot of NLPers would be interested in this case of the anorexic. In fact, if you would care to write up a fairly informal article on this case, I suspect that Anchor Point (the main NLP magazine) would publish it.

>NLP seems to be quite superficial, and it has very little empirical
>support. But there's always room for the superficial if we know where it
>applies and where it doesn't.

As practiced by the average NLP practitioner, I think that ``superficial'' is probably a fair description. And yet some of the changes which fellow students help me make when I went through my original NLP training had profound effects on my life. And the same seemed to be the case for many other students in my training.

One of the first friends I worked with had a voice in her head that would manifest itself especially when she was walking (which she did a lot) and start telling her about all the things that were wrong in her life and making her more and more depressed. I did a single session with her (although I'd worked with her on a number of other issues before) and the next time I saw her she said, ``The voice is gone! What you did with me is incredible. The other changes you've helped me make have been important, but this is like being a new person. I'm having to learn to get used to it.''

Now the change I faciliated in that case was simple and very specific. But it had a profound impact on her life. So some people would call it superficial and some people would not.

What makes therapy hard is not making this kind of change, but realizing what change needs to be made. This was what most of my first NLP training was about. We spent very little time learning techniques. With my friend, I had the advantage that after the previous work we had done together she had already been able to identify the desired change for herself.

The reports I've been hearing indicate that many people going through Connirae Andreas's new process (the Core Transformation) are experiencing very profound changes. It was certainly extremely useful to me in helping me learn to deal with a type of anger which used to result in my just cutting close friends out of my life for rather trivial reasons.

--
Trying to understanding learning by understanding schooling is rather like trying to understand sexuality by studying bordellos.     -- Mary Catherine Bateson, Peripheral Visions