As previously stated, it would not be surprising that we would disagree on a matter of substance. But I'm not sure that our differences are more than semantics.

> Lee Lady writes:
> >SNIP<
>> Is behavioral therapy based on behavioral psychology, for instance?
>
> Yes. Or more accurately, they have a common philosophical/theoretical
> core (which we often call Behaviorism). Behavioral psychology seeks to
> validate the underlying model and characterize various phenomena in
> terms of that model. Behavioral therapy involves characterizing the
> existing (unwanted) condition in terms of that model and applying some
> sort of "treatment" (also consistent with that model) to change it in
> some desirable manner.

Okay, this is more or less my understanding. Behaviorism is an attitude, a point of view, some would even say a dogma. There are lots of different variants, but in essence it says that we don't need to be concerned with internal psychological processes, everything can be understood in terms of overt behavior. Behavioral therapy is similar insofar as it starts with the assumption that the goal of therapy is to change overt behavior.

But behavioral psychology is not Behaviorism. Whatever one's attitude toward Behaviorism, I think one almost has to acknowledge the validity of behavioral psychology, although there are certainly disagreements as to the extent of its value.

There is a very extensive body of careful research in behavioral psychology. Now my point is that, to the best of my knowledge, behavioral therapy does not depend on any of this research in behavioral psychology. In fact, from what I know, someone who had never heard of behavioral psychology but did accept the basic point of view that the concentration of therapy should be on overt behavior would probably have come up with approximately the same set of interventions as the behavioral therapists just on the basis of common sense.

Furthermore, it seems to me that behavioral therapy early on actually abandoned strict Behaviorism, which as I understand it says that one only need to pay attention to the stimulus in the environment and the organism's response to it, without giving any thought to the intervening mechanism. In other words, it is useful to treat the organism as a "black box."

On the other hand, almost all behavioral therapy, as far as I know, uses the subject's imagination as a tool by having the subject imagine the stimulus of concern. By doing this, the behavioral therapists are acknowledging first the obvious fact that what the organism really responds to is the sensory information from the stimulus, and secondly that the organism responds in pretty much the same way whether the sensory information is generated internally by the brain itself or is received from the external environment.

But now once you accept the fact that people's affect and behavior can be (and frequently are) determined by the images that the brain creates (or remembers), it seems to me that the logical next step is to consider the possibility that it might be worthwhile to start asking people questions about these images and helping them to change them. And once you start doing that, you are well down the road to doing NLP.

Of course the behavioral therapists for the most part don't take that next step. Rather than helping the subject change the image, they leave the image alone and train the subject to have a different response to it. (I think that partly this is a result of a psychological naivete on the part of the behavioral therapists. Namely, they assume that an internal image is nothing more than an accurate representation of the external stimulus.) And in order to do this, they give the subject training in relaxation. But here too, as I see it, one is no longer keeping a strict Behavioralist point of view. It is questionable whether relaxation can be considered an overt behavior. It seems much more like an internal state, and this means that the behavioral therapist has conceded that it's worthwhile to make adjustments inside the Black Box, rather than focusing only on overt behavior.

But once one acknowledges that the organism's internal state has a lot to do with behavior, I think that the logical next step would be to ask, "Why relaxation?" Relaxation, after all, is not a very powerful internal state and so if one is trying to overcome phobic fear, why not experiment with some other states? And then at that point, one is pretty close to inventing NLP anchoring techniques.

The behavioral therapist, of course, does not take that step. And I think that the reason has to do not with a philosophical attitude, but with a much deeper attitude towards dealing with people that, I believe, lies behind behavioral therapy. Namely, in order to elicit a variety of internal states from a subject, one has to have some real rapport, beyond merely the level of smiling and shaking hands. One has to have at least some slight degree of intimacy.

And it's my belief that the real drive behind behavioral therapy is not a philosophical commitment to Behaviorism, but a desire to do therapy without intimacy.

>> Is cognitive therapy based on cognitive psychology?
>
> Same argument, different philosophical/theoretical core.

Cognitive psychology, as I understand it, has two roots. One is the study of mental imagery, going back to the original experiments proving that people do indeed have mental images by having subjects rotate cubes. The other root is the theory of language starting with Chomsky's transformational grammar.

Cognitive therapy, as far as I know (and I think I can count on someone to correct me if I'm wrong), doesn't actually attempt to apply any of the research on language-based thinking from cognitive psychology. In this respect, NLP, with its original roots in transformational grammar, actually has more in common with cognitive psychology.

And cognitive therapy, to the best of my knowledge, does not concern itself with mental images at all but pretty much takes it as a given that thinking is verbal, which makes it considerably less advanced than some of cognitive psychology.

In my opinion, NLP is considerably ahead of both cognitive psychology and cognitive therapy in this respect, with its assumption that thinking is actually a combination of internal conversation, mental and auditory images, and somasthetic feelings.

However nobody in NLP has ever attempted to lay all this out as a systematic scientific theory, since NLPers do not see developing theories of scientific psychology as their business. I've tried to explain the ideas myself in some of the articles in my archive, but I'm only a mathematician doing armchair speculation and if my articles have any value at all, it will be only as a starting point for serious scientific investigation.

It seems to me that the basic axiom in Cognitive Therapy is that cognition causes affect. On the other hand, all the books on cognitive psychology that I've looked at seem interested only in pure cognition. There seems to be a pointed disinterest in looking at the interaction between cognition and behavior or affect.

[ March, 1996: The above paragraph was written before I discovered George Mandler's book Mind and Body, which devotes considerable attention to the interactions between cognition and emotion. ]

In fact, the study of emotions is in its infancy in scientific psychology. And yet emotions are certainly of central concern in most therapy. And so for this reason if no other, it seems to me that scientific psychology has a limited amount to offer to therapists.

>> I think that NLP is much more theory-driven than conventional clinical
>> psychology. Sure, the test of whether an NLP technique is good is
>> whether it works or not, but those techniques don't arise in the first
>> place out of magic or from a post-office box in Schennektady.
>
> The point is that in NLP, good=it works, while in the others good=
> consistent with theory.
>
>> Some of them come out of modeling individuals who have a certain skill
>> or don't have a certain common problem, some have come from modeling
>> extremely successful therapists such as Satir and Erickson.
>
> And none of them come from pushing, pulling, squeezing, or stretching a
> condition to fit a philosophical model and then asking "what does the
> model say about what should be done?"

Well, I think that leading NLPers are not always not completely immune from this and not always quite as pragmatic as we claim to be. However, I agree that on the whole NLP seems to be a lot less ideological than most other approaches to therapy, including the "scientific" ones.

>> But many of them are derived from applying various assumptions about
>> the way the mind works. (In practicular, I think this is true about
>> all the submodality techniques.)
>
> As developer of one set of submodality techniques (the "Personal Angel
> Points" techniques), in frequent touch with the developers of others
> (eg Steve Andreas' Grief pattern), I disagree. Every submodality pattern
> I am familiar with was derived by modeling (in submodality terms) people
> with and without some "problem"/resource, then trying out various
> submodality changes until the condition changes (followed by the usual
> stepwise refinement), or by modeling (in submodality terms) an existing
> change agent's technique for a particular change.

Okay, I know this is true for such things as the patterns for motivation, accepting criticism, and so on. I don't see how it can be the case for such fundamental techniques as the second half of the phobia cure (running the experience backwards) or the Swish Pattern.

But you see, when you "model" people -- that is try to understand the structure of their subjective experience -- the things you discover will be the result of the types of questions you ask. And in particular, if you want to elicit submodality distinctions from a subject you have to ask special kinds of questions which are not easy to learn to ask. In this respect, the underlying theory that you start with determines the type of information you will get from subjects.

This is basically the same phenomenon that causes a psychoanalyst to always discover an Oedipus Complex or Electra Complex at the core of every patient's problem and causes every therapist committed to Transactional Analysis to discover a Child, Parent, and Adult within every person. It is not unreasonable for a skeptical psychologist to ask whether the process of asking NLP style questions to a subject is really discovering submodality distinctions or instead actually creating them. I myself am firmly convinced that it's the former, but I don't have any good way of convincing skeptical psychologists of that.

Furthermore, even when you have elicited a subject's strategy for not having a particular problem, it is usually not obvious how to teach that strategy to someone else. I vaguely remember, for instance, Leslie Cameron Bandler telling us how VK Dissociation was discovered by asking questions of a woman who claimed not to have any bad memories. As I recall, the woman told them that when she remembered unpleasant events in her past, she remembered them as if they were happening to another person. I am pretty sure this woman did not tell them anything about imagining floating up out of her body and watching herself watch a black and white movie of the experience. That, the actual intervention, was something the NLP developers had to devise themselves and they were guided in this (I believe) in large part by their own theoretical assumptions.

    >SNIP<
> Very true. BUT...if you go back over your notes (and tapes, if you have
> them), you should find a lot of details about the nature of models and
> metamodels, but little or no information about the "real" nature of the
> mind. Most of the information framed as "peoples' minds seem to act as
> though..." rather than "they act this way because the mind really...".
> They concentrate on mechanisms, not explanations.

Yes, in my experience the best NLP trainers are very careful not to claim that they know the truth about the way the mind works but only that it seems to be useful to think in terms of certain models.

But my point is that there is indeed some fairly fancy theoretical structure involved in these NLP models and that NLP techniques are not discovered by a process of random trial and error.

I think that we don't really disagree with that, you just take issue with the way I stated it.