> I just wanted to ask if you've read the article by Asimov, "My Built in
> Doubter." I read it a couple of days ago (in a reading across the curriculum
> book), and thought that it was the most reasonable type of response the
> G's of the world could make to the Ladys of the world's charges.
>
> In any case, I was wondering if you had read it, and if so what your reactions > were.

I don't know whether I ever read that particular article or not. But I do know Asimov's attitudes fairly well, as a result of years of reading his science articles in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and his editorials in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. While he had his own occasional incidences of prejudice and irrationality, on the whole he was a very sensible person and I think that his attitudes were representative of those most scientists would take.

As Isaac Asimov himself sometimes admitted, on some occasions the normal attitude of skepticism, which is actually quite essential to scientific thinking, has actually served science badly, in that it makes it difficult for new ideas, especially when they come from outside the scientific establishment, to get a fair hearing.

Now new ideas should, in fact, be met with considerable skepticism. It is in fact essential to the scientific process that anything which deviates from what is generally accepted as scientific fact be required to prove itself in the face of very strong challenges.

In this way, it is natural that psychologists be extremely skeptical of NLP. I have always acknowledged this. I have never asked psychologists to "embrace NLP," as Elise Swope once accused in a comment I quoted recently. What I have tried to do is to show some psychologists, both on the scientific and clinical side, that there seems to be reason to believe that NLP is worth knowing about and investigating, albeit skeptically. The most natural way to do this by reading books. There is also now a lot of material available on the net, in my own archive among other places. I also very much want to encourage psychologists to find a way of looking at some NLP videotapes, because I believe that there are some important things one can only learn by watching NLPers at work, rather than reading their attempts to describe what it is they do.

Perhaps, in part, there has been a misperception in that my words, often chosen extremely carefully, have still not accurately expressed my own attitude. For instance let me try to quote from memory part of an article I posted a few months ago when people were discussing the behavioral cure for phobias.

"I think that those who treat phobias should also be aware that many "therapists have claimed to be successful in curing phobias using the "NLP Fast Phobia/Trauma Cure, often in a single session. Although there "do not exist good published empirical studies supporting the "effectiveness of this cure, it is so simple and easy to learn that a "therapist can easily try it out for him/herself."

Somebody responded that this was "doctrinaire" on my part. Well, maybe it does sound that way, but as I said, I chose my words extremely carefully and I believe that everything I said is a statement of fact. It is in fact true that many therapists claim to have success with the NLP cure. I have met a number of them myself, and clearly the number of therapists using NLP which I have personally met is a small proportion of the total.

I said (and I remember wording this very carefully) that many therapists claim to have treated successfully. I did not state that their claims are justified or are representative of the results other therapists can expect, although I certainly do believe this. I do understand that people would rather have published controlled studies rather than mere clinical experience. But I do think that when a large number of clinicians report striking success with a particular approach, it's worth paying some attention to that, admittedly anecdotal, evidence and thinking that probably some further, more systematic, investigation is justified.

I also believe that when a technique is so simple that a therapist can learn it from a book or from a one-day seminar, and seems apparently harmless in comparison to a lot of standard therapeutic techniques, it would be foolish for a therapist not to at least try it out, on a friend if not on a client, just to get some sense of what it's like. I carefully did not state that such a single-subject trial would give conclusive results.

I still don't see what there is objectionable in what I posted. As I've said, I believe that every word is simply a matter of fact.

This letter is going to turn out to be somewhat long, and I'm probably going to wind up posting some form of it, since there are certain things I find it easier to write in response to a friendly inquiry than in response to somebody who's attacking everything I say and attributing to me many things I never said (as G, for instance, almost always does; I seldom reply to such straw man arguments, since I believe that such I-never-said-that/You-did-too-say-so arguments almost never accomplish anything useful).

I know that you're on the scientific side rather than the clinical, but it always astonishes me that psychologists don't pick up the fact that there's something going on in these discussions more than what shows up on the surface.

When I was doing counseling, I became very sensitive to the indications that I was touching on one of my client's very strong beliefs, something s/he would fiercely defend against any attack. These were the beliefs that clients did not even want to have discussed. If I insisted on talking about them, their voices would get louder and often higher in pitch and faster. It was often generally impossible to get them to offer any sort of justification for these beliefs, because the very act of offering justifications would suggest the unthinkable --- that the belief could be subject to discussion, might need justification. Instead, the client would simply repeat the belief in a very firm, and sometimes a little frantic, tone of voice.

Aside from the tone of voice, there's a certain conspicuous irrationality in the discussion that is a tip-off when such crucial beliefs are being touched on. Everytime I would try to dispute one argument the client offers against what seems like a quite modest suggestion for change, a dozen other arguments will take its place, and there will be sometimes rather bizarre attempts to divert the discussion elsewhere. The client will constantly attribute to me extreme statements which I never made, and it may in fact become impossible for me to get him/her to even listen to my words. In some cases, s/he may even drown out my words by screaming.

Surely what I'm saying can't be news to any clinicians who read the newsgroup, but it astonishes me that any psychologist of persuasion would not be familiar with this phenomenon.

And yet people don't seem to notice that the same thing happens in the sci.psychology newsgroups.

It's not too surprising that psychologists are extremely skeptical about NLP. It would be quite understandable if they were simply saying, "We don't think there's enough evidence to take NLP seriously. There are lots of people out there with all kinds of assorted ideas that they call psychology --- gestalt therapy, RET, est, Scientology, even faith healing --- and all of these sometimes report dramatic successes. The fact is that sometimes something even completely bizarre does some good in some particular case, and furthermore clients sometimes get better because of random factors not having anything to do with the therapy at all, but therapists still often claim credit for these changes. In order to be able to claim that a therapy is worth taking seriously, you need to show that it consistently produces good results, and for this you need more than anecdotal evidence."

This is a sensible argument, although I do believe that in the case of certain very simple NLP techniques it is not a valid one. It's a tough case for me to make, though, and I can't really blame psychologists for just shrugging and walking away, taking me for an idiot.

But the response goes way beyond this. Over and over again, the response is emotional and irrational. When Elise Swope said, "Lee Lady asks that we psychologists give up all our scientific approaches and embrace NLP," she was attributing to me something so wildly different from anything I have ever said that one cannot explain it as simple inaccuracy. Her statement was simply irrational. (Sorry to keep using her as an example, but it was an example that seemed strikingly irrational to me at the time.)

When G says not merely that my articles are unjustified or even wrong, but when he virtually shouts that I should not be allowed to post them, this is an indication of irrationality.

Damn! I knew that if I got started on this it would go on forever and ever. Sorry, you're getting the unorganized version.

Okay, as to G. In a recent article, I talked about his being "threatened" by what I say, and I chose my words very carefully in order to hint at what I will now spell out --- the fact that some of G's most crucial beliefs are threatened by the NLP discussions that come up.

To see what these beliefs are (and remembering always the danger of trying to know what is in someone else's mind), one has to look at not what G says overtly, but the things he doesn't want to discuss, the things he wants us to take for granted. When he says, "NLP should not be talked about because there are no conclusive studies in its favor," (sorry, it's too late for me to scavenge an exact quote, which would make my point more effectively), what's crucial is not the statement that there are no good favorable studies on NLP. This is what he'd like to discuss; a discussion on these grounds is not threatening to him. But the important point is the assumption that he wants us to take for granted --- namely, that "research" is the way (and the ONLY way) to tell whether therapeutic approaches are not good or not. When he gets irrational is when there is an attempt to discuss that assumption.

It's understandable. Consider his situation. Here is a guy who is not too bright and who has invested a big part of his life in learning how to do "scientific" research in psychotherapy. If, in fact, he were to start doubting that the the research which he has worked so hard to learn has value, or that the methodology he has learned is in fact what ought to be called "science," he would have nothing left. It would mean (in the worst case) that everything he has done in the past six or seven years has been a waste.

According to everything G believes, NLP has not been developed in a scientific way. Now if NLP turns out in fact to be worthwhile, if in fact (again, worse case possibility, which I doubt is true) that it's actually more important than all other approaches to therapy together... then that would seem to say that the "scientific" approach that G has investigated so much of hims life in is not in fact the best way of developing therapy.

But there's more than this, and I think this is the reason a lot of people in the academic community get so angry when the subject of NLP comes up. Namely, there's the fact that NLP trainings are offered to the general public. There are no prerequisites. You don't need to go to school for four years to get a bachelor's degree, you don't need to go to graduate school. Just go through about 300 hours of training and you're an NLP Master Practitioner. And there are lots of people now, with no more training than this who are using NLP as a stand-alone therapy.

The fact that one can become a therapist in this way, maybe even a better therapist than conventionally educated ones, just has to be fairly frightening to someone who has invested seven or eight years of his life going through conventional training.

This, in my opinion, is what makes a rational discussion of NLP so difficult. What makes it so difficult for academic psychology to take the obviously sensible approach.

This sensible approach, in my opinion, would start by finding out whether the anecdotal evidence, the existing clinical experience, would justify any serious investigation at all. In other words, one needs to talk to a large number of therapists who use NLP and listen to what they have to say, take a survey. Then do some preliminary studies on the techniques which are easy to study, such as the phobia cure. Then start doing whatever serious research seems justified.

And then, if the academics were smart, they'd simply co-opt the NLPers by incorporating NLP into their own clinical trainings. Since in fact, in my opinion, NLP as used by the average practitioner is not an adequate stand-alone therapy except for a very restricted set of problems, the end result would be that NLP as a separate entity would eventually disappear.

Sorry, this has become extremely long and it's very late at night. Normally I do quite a bit of proof-reading and revising before I send a letter. But it may be several days before I have time to look at this again, so I'm going to send it as is.

I do want to acknowledge the point, though, that certainly what I've said does not remove the value of having a doubting machine when it comes to NLP. And that even if I'm correct about the motives of many of those who are so emotional in their opposition to NLP, one needs to remember that people can still be correct in what they believe even when their motives for believing it are not good.

Ultimately, I can only try to explain the ideas, and tell people about my own experience, and tell people what I know of the anecdotal evidence. None of this can possibly be convincing in and of itself. People have to have a desire to find out what the truth is and be willing to investigate for themselves.

At this point, I believe that there are already a sufficient number of people in the academic world who have that willingness and are doing that investigation. So I find that I have a limited willingness to invest energy in convincing others of something where ultimately the benefit (if any) will be for them, not for me.

Good night.

--Lee