CO-FOUNDER OF NLP
Richard Bandler
Co-founder of NLP. Modeled Perls, Satir, and Erickson with John Grinder; co-authored the foundational NLP texts.
PRINCIPAL CONTRIBUTION
Co-creation of NLP itself; the swish pattern, fast phobia cure, and much of submodality work.
Richard Bandler is one of the two co-founders of neuro-linguistic programming. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the early 1970s, Bandler began studying the patterns of effective therapists and recognized that their results came from reproducible language and behavioral patterns. Working with linguist John Grinder, Bandler modeled Fritz Perls (Gestalt therapy), Virginia Satir (family therapy), and Milton Erickson (hypnotherapy). The patterns they extracted became the first generation of NLP techniques, published in The Structure of Magic (1975) and Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson (1975-1977).
Bandler continued to develop NLP through the 1980s and 1990s, contributing the swish pattern, the fast phobia cure, much of submodality work, and Design Human Engineering. He founded the Society of NLP (SNLP) as a certifying body and has remained an active trainer through his own programs. His later work has often been controversial within the field, and his collaboration with Grinder dissolved in legal disputes in the late 1990s.
Key works
- 1975
The Structure of Magic, Vol. I
Foundational text
- 1976
The Structure of Magic, Vol. II
- 1975
Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson
With John Grinder
- 1979
Frogs into Princes
- 1985
Using Your Brain - For a Change
- 2008
Get the Life You Want
LEGACY
NLP itself would not exist without Bandler's modeling project. Much of the field's core toolkit - the meta model, Milton model, swish pattern, submodality work - traces directly to his work.