It's especially distressing when one has invested a large part of one's life in learning to follow a particular set of rules and then a bunch of outlaw competitors come along who break all the rules and get much better results.

The first response in this case is usual denial: "Their methods don't really work at all." Then comes the attempt to protect oneself by regulation or legislation: "Those people shouldn't be allowed to do what they do or to tell the world about it."

In article <2ca5kc2w165w@mindvox.phantom.com> ikg@mindvox.phantom.com (Ivan Goldberg) writes:
> Lee Lady writes:
>
>> Once upon a time, in a great country known throughout the world as the
>> land of the free and the home of the brave, there lived an idealistic
>> ....
>
> It is beautiful stories like this one that not only demonstrate
> the scientific bankruptcy of the proponents of NLP, but which also make it
> clear why moderated psychology newsgroups are needed. How psychologists
> can take seriously a psychotherapeutic technique backed with no scientific
> evidence, is a sad reflection on mental health professionals. The folks who

Thanks for calling my story beautiful. Even if you hadn't praised it, the very fact that it troubled you enough to cause you to break your New Years resolution is testimony to its effectiveness.

Sometimes it takes something beautiful, or funny, or just plain silly to jostle someone out of their existing mindset enough so they can look at their beliefs again with some perspective and a little common sense. I found it a very useful tool when I was doing counseling and changework.

There is a something a bit absurd about a discipline (clinical psychology) which even after ten years is unable to make a judgement about the effectiveness of a procedure for curing phobias which usually takes ten or fifteen minutes. It is even more absurd when this impotence is vaunted as proof of being scientific. Meanwhile those who make no claim to being scientific, including many practicing therapists, manage to evaluate the phobia cure fairly quickly by doing what the supposed scientists are unwilling to --- simply trying it out.

It's great that Bill Goodrich's friends put in the effort to do a five-year outcome study on the phobia cure, although the very results he got show the absurdity of anyone supposing this sort of study necessary. However as yet the critics are still left with the last refuge of the mediocre scientist: "It doesn't mean anything since it's not published."

Do you really believe that next year and the year after that and the year after that there will still be no published studies? How old are you that you can be indifferent to the prospect that within a few years the statements you make now will look extremely foolish?

> ... The folks who
> are into NLP would be left quite alone, if they did not pretend to be part of
> the world of scientific psychology. They should do what the scientologists
> have done . . . start their own church, call their "therapy" a sacrament,
> and all of us who value the scientific method will leave them totally alone.

How odd. This is precisely what most scientists, including many psychologists, say about clinical psychology.

NLP certainly has no claim to be a part of scientific psychology or even clinical psychology. Nonetheless, it is predictable that within the next ten years NLP will result in some profound changes in the nature of research in clinical psychology and on the conception within the discipline of what being scientific means.

The methodology of clinical research was developed to test approaches that were lengthy, expensive, didn't work very well, and intended to treat problems that were not very well defined. The stakes were high in finding out whether these approaches were effective. Testing them required very careful statistical work and sophisticated diagnostic instruments.

In those days, it was the scientific investigators who were the outlaws, along with the behavioral therapists. The skepticism of the establishment psychiatrists was much like Dr. Goldberg's skepticism toward NLP. They didn't want to hear about phobias cured by desensitization. It was well known, they proclaimed, that a phobia is an externalization of the patient's fear of his own forbidden urges and that to attempt a direct intervention through something like desensitization is merely to invite symptom substitution. The supposed cures of the behavioral therapists, they claimed, would often result in crippling patients with even more severe neuroses, perhaps even psychoses. The establishment psychiatrists were quite certain about this.

But the outlaw therapists continued to cure phobias with behavioral methods. As far as I know, their conservative critics never did acknowledge that they had been mistaken. But the statements they had made were one of the things that eventually came to discredit the psychoanalysts.

Because of NLP (and to a lesser extent behavioral therapy) I think the day will soon arrive where it will no longer be possible to brag about being scientific because of careful testing of mediocre treatments. Instead, the mark of being scientific will be the discovery of easy approaches which work so well that their effectiveness is apparent without the need for statistical testing. And as extremely brief therapy becomes the norm, the stakes will go down and the need for certainty in evaluation of techniques will be greatly diminished.

At the same time, the nature of therapy and our conception of what constitutes therapy will change. Just as today we no longer think of assertiveness training or help for smokers who want to quit as being therapy, I think that soon the same will be true of curing many of the anxiety disorders.

One doesn't need six years graduate study or even a 22 day NLP training to learn to neutralize traumatic memories using NLP desensitization. A nurse at a rape crisis center will be able to go through a one-day training and learn enough to help the victims she deals with.

To me, this is a very exciting prospect and I like to believe that my articles on usenet are helping to bring it about. But I can also understand that those who have invested a large part of their life in learning to play by the old rules can find it rather frightening.