After watching the videos of the 50th. Anniversary, I felt that I had to say something since so much is missing and so much seems (to me) distorted. I wrote the following on Neurons … as strictly my own personal opinion; it doesn’t represent anyone else’s view.
THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY
AND THE FOUNDER’S SELF-PROMOTIONS
Last week both John Grinder and Richard Bandler held a joint web-presentation celebrating the 50th Anniversary of NLP. But that’s a bit deceptive. They did not actually get together and hold the celebration of 50 years. Instead each of them separately recorded a 30 minute presentation in which they were asked a few questions. Supposedly they were to answer questions that the audience asked, but in the end all of the questions were softball questions. Actually, extremely softball questions! None were challenging in the least. The questions, in fact, were such that the questions allowed each one to boast and glory in himself. I had submitted two questions that would have been challenging, but they were obviously not mentioned as were many others that I knew about.
If you listen to the presentations what you will learn is that each man thinks that what he did was absolutely spectator. And both of them think they created the NLP model completely between themselves! They had no help and needed no help. They congratulate each other, but no one else! They seem to have totally forgotten the role of Frank Pucelik and the way Robert Dilts formulated nearly all of the original NLP model. John seems now to dismiss the role of Frank saying he only imitates(!), a very different story from his book that introduced Frank as “The Third Man.”
They also had amnesia about the many different Gestalt and Meta Groups which in The Structure of Magic they described as “therapists groups.” What a complete forgetting! It was as if none of them existed and none of them were co-founders. I addressed this in the book, NLP Secrets: Untold Stories (2018). And still, 50 years later, the stories are still untold … at least by Richard and John.
Richard tried to emphasize that he gave credit to others, but only to the obvious— Virginal Satir, Milton Erickson, Noam Chomsky, somehow he forgot Fritz! He also magically forgot to mention Frank, Robert, Leslie, Judith, or many other key people who actually turned the first discoveries into what became known as the NLP Communication Model.
He also engaged in a good bit of “change personal history” inasmuch as what he is saying now does not correspond to what he has said over the years in books and videos. He now claims that he got things from various people even though there is no historical record of those people. An example he now credits Dorothy Kimura for eye accessing cue although she was never mentioned in any previous NLP book. Neither Richard nor John ever mentioned her regarding eye accessing cues! Paul Bach-y-Rita was mentioned once, but only a brief reference. Not exactly a big source for NLP. Moshe Feldenkrais was also only briefly mentioned a few times. He was primarily referred to in a training Richard did in London in 1990 Neuro-Dynamics (a training that I transcribed at Richard’s request and turned into a book—a book which has not been published).
The biggest elephant in the room from this 50th year anniversary is that they did not speak at all about their lawsuits with each other, with the divisions they created in the field, or with the $90,000,000 lawsuit that essentially destroyed NLP in the United States. Nothing at all about that! Another nice thing to be amnesic about.
Not a word was said about the fact that neither has supported the field in recommending any of the leaders who have arisen who have made NLP what it is. I’m thinking specifically of Robert Dilts and Steve Andreas. If it were not for Robert and Steve and Connaire, NLP would have never achieved its recognition in the 1970s and 1980s that it did. They did far more than Richard or John in those years to formalize and promote NLP. If not for them, there very well could be no NLP.
Over the years, neither John or Richard ever came to any of the NLP Conferences around the world to support the field. They never wrote articles for the many Journals that we had in the 1980s and 1990s (except when someone wrote an article about them). Instead each worked to keep his ‘camp’ going and refused to acknowledge each other or anyone else. That’s not exactly what we think of leaders.
Given that, I would say that they were only founders, but not leaders. They never groomed others to step up to lead the field. They never gave credit to people making contributions to the field. When I took my training with Richard, there were no patterns from Dilts or Grinder—none. I walked out of Master Practitioner never hearing one word about what they offered to NLP.
Over the years many of us tried to get both of the founders to participate. We asked them in 1997 to come to the Visionary Leadership Conference. Neither did. Although Richard sent his lawyer (!) who met some of us out on “the green grass.” They following day John showed up on “the green grass” to present his side of the 90 million dollar lawsuit. We asked them to show up at the Millennial Project (2000), neither did. We asked them to come to the 40th Anniversary; they did not. Richard sent a two minute video. What’s amazing to me is that while we asked them to be leaders—and they refused.
Then last year (2024) some years after Frank Pucelik and I started the NLP Leadership Summit (2011), we held the Summit in Santa Cruz California where John still lives. Did he show up? No, of course not. But Judith DeLozier did. Then she and Robert gave the group of 70 plus NLP leaders a tour of Kresge College and the University of Southern California.
My view? The founders are bold in taking credit for what they partially founded, something which they did not grow. They contributed a lot of the first intellectual structures, but were unable to contribute any kind of true leadership over the decades. NLP Leadership fell to those who created the Conferences, the Associations, the Journals, the Research Conference, who developed new models, new patterns, and new communities (as indicated in Innovations in NLP, 2012).
References
I wrote NLP Secrets: The Untold Stories as a journalistic investigation researching it via reading countless books on the origins of NLP, collecting sources, cross-referencing, and relying on numerous personal experiences with those who were there. There I emphasized that NLP’s origins were the result of a community effort. It was not accomplished by any one or two individuals. To create NLP, it took Robert Spitzer introducing Perls’ works and to Satir herself. It took Bateson send them to Erickson. It took all of the individuals in the original groups for the collective contribution they made including David Gordon, Stephen Gilligan, Terry McClendon, and many, many more. https://www.neurosemantics.com/shop/page/7/