WHY DID BATESON STOP SUPPORTING NLP?

Here is an odd and strange fact of history. In 1974, Gregory Bateson read the manuscript of The Structure of Magic and was unduly impressed. So impressed was he that he wrote the Introduction and Virginia Satir wrote the Foreword. In his Introduction he spoke about himself, the founders, and NLP’s “modes of communication” (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc.).

“It is a strange pleasure to write an introduction to this book because Grinder and Bandler have done something similar to what my colleagues and I attempted fifteen years ago. ... They have succeeded in making linguistics into a base for theory and simultaneously into a tool for therapy. ... We did not see that these various ways of coding—visual, auditory, etc.—are so far apart, so mutually different even in neuro-physiological representation, that no material in one mode can ever be of the same logical type as any material in any other mode. This discovery seems obvious when the argument starts from linguistics...”

Gregory not only praised them for what they did, he was the deciding voice who convinced Robert Spitzer of Science and Behavior Books to publish the book. Without his influence, it might have never been published. That was 1974. That same year he introduced the founders to Milton H. Erickson and commented that trance epistemology was bad epistemology. Then after that— nothing is heard from Bateson about NLP ever again. He never wrote a single word to support it; he never appeared at any Conference. Why not? What explains this very strange historical fact. What happened?

After 1975 he essentially disappeared from the scene. Well, not exactly, he disappeared only from the NLP scene. Actually he kept writing and presenting at Conferences and was very prolific. In 1979 he published Mind and Nature which was made from numerous articles. He quoted “The map is not the territory” (p. 30, 117) but never mentioned NLP. He wrote about all of the themes that dominate in NLP: epistemology, mind, logical levels, meta-classifications, differences, contexts, neurons, recursiveness, learning, epigenesis—all without a mention of NLP, not even in the footnotes. Yet most of all he focus on thinking.

“In Chapter 2, the reader was given almost didactic advice about how to think, and in Chapter 3, he or she was given clues to how thoughts come together. This is the beginning of a study of how to think about thinking.” (Mind and Nature, p. 98) “I am concerned at this moment only with understanding how mind and mental process must necessarily work. ... Information consists of differences that make a difference.” (Ibid., p. 105)

In his last years, he moved to Esalen and lived there on the grounds as the Scholar in Residence. There also he got sick and eventually died (1980). But his writings continued. What he started in 1977, his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson finished. It was published in his name,Angels Fear (1979/1987). Here he continued to focus on mind and thinking.

“Thinking is my job in life.” (p. 70). “What is it to think? What is it to be?” (p. 94). “Consciousness means that you know that you know.” (p. 100). And the book ends with “I kept trying to get people to think straight, to clean up their premises.” (204)

Nor did that end things. In 1991 Rodney Donaldson publish yet more of Bateson’s articles in his book, A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1991). Bateson himself said that Steps was “a new way of thinking about ideas...”

“Bateson’s work is unique.” He provided “a solid foundation for understanding what is wrong with current ways of thinking about humankind and nature. Since he spent his entire life explicating how to think about mental process of whatever sort, Bateson’s work is of value to scholars in virtually every field...” (p. xi)

Here he continues writing about thinking, learning, the meta-move, logical levels, frames and framing, paradox, epistemology, etc. With regard to language, he was forever de-nominalizing terms (although he never uses the NLP term, nominalization). Instead he speaks about “misplaced concreteness,” “thingishness,” and the “dormitive principle.” In “the world of mind” “difference makes a difference.” “A difference is an elementary idea. It is the stuff of which minds are made.” (p. 162). The way you think matters.

“The way to phrase scientific questions is with the word ‘how’ and not with the word ‘why.’” (196). “When I was preparing the Korzybski Lecture, when I suddenly realized that of course the bridge between map and territory is difference. It is only news of difference that can get from the territory to the map, and this fact is the basic epistemological statement about the relationship between all reality out there and all perception in here: that bridge must always be in the form of difference.” (218)

“Thinking is mental variation” (236). “In thought what we have are ideas. There are no pigs, no coconut palms, no people, no books, no pins, no ... you know? Nothing. There are only ideas of pigs and coconut palms and people and whatever.” (327). “The view of the world in terms of things is a distortion supported by language, and that the correct view of the world is in terms of the dynamic relationship which are the governors of growth.” (311).

What should we make of all of this? What is most obvious from all of Bateson’s books and articles is that he was focused on how we think and how we construct meaning. NLP seemed to have gone in another direction. Given that Bateson was so excited about NLP at the beginning and that afterward, in all of Bateson’s books and articles after 1975, he never mentions NLP even once— the conclusion seems compelling, namely, he did not see that NLP was going to pursue its essential essence as a thinking model.

Now if Bateson, as the grandfather of NLP, and to whom the NLP world owes so much, if Bateson was focused on “a new way of thinking about ideas” (the theme of Steps to an Ecology of Mind), perhaps we should explore that theme as well. He apparently saw that as the direction that the future needed. I think we should also.