“THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE THERAPISTS!”

When you read The Structure of Magic, the very book that launched NLP and the NLP movement worldwide, there’s a really strange thing. Namely, John and Richard present themselves as “therapists.” That’s what I thought when I first read the book. But they were not. Neither of them. John had never even studied psychology, let alone psychotherapy. Richard had listened to the audio and videos of Fritz Perls and transcribed them, and he had possibly read some books about Gestalt, but neither had any training in psychotherapy. Neither of them had one day in a college class on the subject of therapy!

What they did was much simplier. Frank Pucelik, who had studied Gestalt Therapy and Richard Bandler decided to get together and create a Gestalt class that was allowed at Kresie College in those days. So that’s what they did. They create a study group. The group studied Gestalt as a therapy and the techniques Perls had popularized. Normally, that would not news worthy. But they were getting lots of significant changes! That surprised them. Perhaps they didn’t even think about what would happen or could happen. Perhaps they were solely focused on learning Gestalt academically.