Neuro-linguistic Programming is a specific modelling procedure originally used by NLP co-creator Richard Bandler whilst he was exposed to the work of Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir. What most people think of as NLP is in fact the collection of techniques that were borrowed, adapted and created in the course of developing that modelling process. These techniques, together with NLP itself, conititute the overall "field of NLP".

Introduction

The first steps in the development of NLP (the modelling process) occurred spontaneously whilst Richard Bandler was working with Virginia Satir during a lecture tour of Canada, and as editor of a book on Fritz Perls, and during its earliest stages was actually developed by Bandler and another student at the UCSC (University of California, Santa Cruz) named Frank Pucelik. But the Bandler/Pucelik project hit a brick wall, which led Bandler to seek the help of an assistant professor of linguistics (John Grinder) in order to formalize and codify his discovery so that he could teach his students more effectively.
(As Bandler was a fourth year student at the time, he was entitled, as part of the university's policy, to run an undergraduate course of his own creation if he could find enough students prepared to pay to take the course.)

Thus the development of what is now the field of NLP began as an experimental university course, initially conducted by Bandler and Pucelik, then by Bandler, Pucelik and Grinder, and finally (from about 1975 onwards) by Bandler and Grinder. For most of the 1970s, academic interest in NLP was so limited that Dr Heap's review (1988) lists only four articles/studies which pre-date 1980 (one of which even pre-dates the initial work on NLP). By the same token, Sharpley's articles (1984, 1987) list only 8 early items, of which 3 date to the 1960s, 4 have no direct connection to the field of NLP as such, and only 3 relate to actual experiments.

Having said that, there were some very positive and public comments about Bandler and Grinder's work, especially in response to the publication of their book Frogs into Princes (Real People Press, 1979), such as Professor Elizabeth Loftus' mention of Bandler and Grinder's 'change personal history' technique (Loftus, E.E. (1981) Memory and its distortions. In A.G. Kraut (ed.), The G. Stanley Hall Lecture Series (Washington DC: American Psychological Association. pp. 123-154., and an article by Daniel "Emotional Intelligence" Goleman, who described Bandler and Grinder, in a Psychology Today article of the same name, as "People who Read People" (Psychology Today, Vol.13, No. 2, July 1979).

The the appearance of Frogs into Princes also seems to have triggered a sudden jump in the number of Ph.D. candidates who selected some aspect of NLP as the subject for their doctoral thesis. Yut for some unknown reason, instead of taking their cue from the 1979 book, they instead turned to Bandler and Grinder's earlier book The Structure of Magic II (Science and Behavior Books, 1976). Moreover a concept known as the "preferred representational system" (or PRS) became the focus of almost all of the experiments, with the experimenters investigating whether PRSs really existed, and if they did, whether they were 'stable, how you could spot them and/or use them.

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