The Construction of NLPPT

Prefaces

Preface One: “Not a Collection of Quotes”

What you will not get here is a quote collection. People only refer to publications as “scientific” if they bristle with chains of quoted passages while – rest assured – presenting absolutely no new ideas. These quote collections do not examine the content presented in the quotations; they are merely used as a verification tool for the correctness of the copied text.

The result of such quote collections is that these works contain no single new thought from the author. “No, that idea isn’t mine; you can’t hold me responsible for it. I found that idea elsewhere; I’m just quoting it, giving you the source. You can verify that I’ve quoted it correctly. This way, I’ve written an empirically verifiable sentence.”

The sum of multiple intersubjectively verifiable, objectively present sentences is then compiled into a “scientific book.” One might ask: “Where do you outsource your thinking?” If I can prove that a particular thought is not my own – and a quote provides that proof – then I can make a scientific statement as follows: “Mustermann said or wrote this and that in his publication.” Even if I personally disagree with the statement’s content, I can objectively verify the fact that “it has been said.” By doing this, I am effectively switching my original subject (a track switch), going from “thematic examination” to “formal verification that a statement was made somewhere.” From the empirical scientist’s perspective, however, it’s precisely this hidden track switch that brings about the leap from unscientific to scientific.

This constrictive, neurotically “scientific” pattern of thought will never be able to conceive anything truly “new.” Yet here we are: I have nothing new to share with the world, but I do so in a highly “scientific” way by backing up all I say with quotes. One thing is certain: you cannot become a competent psychotherapist just by compiling theoretical quotes. It’s “experience” that makes the professional, not mere knowledge. If you have never had children and therefore lack “experience” in childrearing, you really shouldn’t pick out gifts for those “little darlings.” Without the experience of raising children or seeing how birthdays go – and repeatedly buying the wrong thing – you know it’s better just to give money. For example, on my daughter’s 16th birthday, she received a coloring book and crayons from her aunt. The aunt was childless, thus had no “experience,” but she “knew” what is typically given at a certain developmental stage.

Preface Two: Against the Arrogance of the Sciences

Humanity behaves as though thought has primacy over action. We say, “Humans are rational beings,” and have the proverb “Think first, then act.” We should be thankful humanity hasn’t abided by that dictum, or else we’d have become extinct long ago. We should be glad it’s the other way around: there is a “primacy of action” before “thinking” – in other words, before science. Thought does not aim to gain knowledge but to find the best survival strategy at any given time. Whatever emerges from that we call “rational,” but it’s only rational in the context of the current frame. If the frame changes, then “Don’t remind me of what I said yesterday” (Adenauer).

And humans are by no means genuinely rational beings but rather advantageoriented animals, no matter the cost. We can rationally see the climate crisis coming at us, but we are paralyzed into inaction. Normally, this realization would trigger an impulse to act, but in view of the scale of the problem, this impulse seems to have given way to resignation.

It used to be different. Since the dawn of humanity, people have “raised children” (the word implies “pulling them along”), even though “pedagogy” has only existed for around 150 years, and “educational science” for about 50. How could that be? Where did “action” get the right to exist without any “science” behind it? But it gets worse: Now that educational science has finally reached the present day, it refuses to give any advice or recommendations regarding correct educational measures. Why? Because science observes and describes but does not interfere by making value judgments. Science, to protect its scientific status, fundamentally refuses to give prescriptions for action. So educators and teachers are once again left to their spontaneous actions.

The same is true for psychotherapy. The world did just fine for some 120 years (let’s say from before 1900, the publication year of Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams”) without psychotherapy. Then psychoanalysis arrived, followed 100 years later by NLP – both with an array of therapeutic techniques – which are still considered “unscientific.”

While “scientific psychotherapy” is confined to tedious mathematics, real excitement arises once we drop the restrictions of science to only the observable and countable. We then engage in something other than “positive empirical social research”; we can begin our psychology with the “creation story.”

Even the term “creation story” (God created the world in six days) involves certain psychological implications relating to sin, guilt, punishment, and development. But that’s not enough, because even the creation story needs pictures: “God created the Earth, created Adam and Eve, a paradise, and the possibility of sin.” And what happened? Thank God there was sin, otherwise there would have been only endless shouts of “Hosanna” and no development. The “apple” and “sin” symbolize a necessary expulsion from paradise, enabling development. Banishment from paradise is vital for the unfolding of a vision. Or if we don’t talk about the creation story but about theories of evolution, then other images come to mind. We all have carried such images (archetypes) and stories within us since well before science or movie theaters existed (i.e., “the primacy of our internal imagery over blockbuster films”).

After these unscientific origin stories about paradise came many sequels. At some point, those stories were gathered and spread far and wide as “the Bible.” The Bible contained the knowledge, faith, laws, morality, psychology, and everything else of the times, even though these fields were not yet scientifically grounded. In order for that large community of Bible readers to gather, a “branch office” was established in every village and called “church.”

Today, the Bible is a storehouse (collection/compendium) of metaphors, fairy tales, stories, or patterns in the evolution of human consciousness, all of which can be used effectively in therapy because so many people know these “parables” and stories.

An example from the New Testament for VAKOG/SM and DLSM: Rumor spread that Jesus had risen from the dead. Jesus appeared to the Apostles, but they did not believe what they saw. Jesus told them to place their hands in his wounds; only then did they know it was truly him. DLSM: “They did not believe (belief system) – then they knew (knowledge).” VAKOG/SM: “K” (kinesthetic) is the most potent modality. Action (touch) is primary.

Let’s take a great leap away from the creation story and the Bible to Plato’s theory of knowledge (the Allegory of the Cave, the three-tiered state, the three-layered structure of cognition) and the beginnings of empirical thinking with Aristotle. What they envisioned as the “ordering of the world” at that time influenced the West for the next 2,500 years. That which people believed they knew in that era may not be “scientific” by our modern standards, but these were conceptual frameworks for thinking and acting that allowed the world to function quite well without our truly understanding it.

Another big leap lands us at the witch burnings, the Renaissance, and the practice of selling indulgences. Each of these phenomenon contained a sort of implicit “unscientific psychological thought,” which Max Weber later presented in “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” (belief systems/values/capitalism/religion). He showed how faith and belief systems guide our actions and impose social change – whether we want them or not. So for 2,500 years or so, people had little or no scientific foundation in psychology or the other sciences, but life still went on.

The so-called “depth” of depth psychology (which does not really go down, but instead increases “depth of focus”), along with the myths of neuropsychology, is fascinating and is more essential to life than mere intellectual discussion about a particular subject.

Preface Three: Apologies for an Adopted Way of Thinking

Some readers may find my word choice, concepts, and thinking rather odd. At this point, I want to reveal the source of my thinking, or I’d be rightly accused of plagiarism. So: My way of thinking and my terminology are strongly influenced by Wilhelm Salber (1928–2016). After 16 semesters of studying his “Morphological Psychology” (a unifying approach to Gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology into a “General Psychology”), I’ve clearly absorbed some of his traces. Portions of morphological terminology have been assimilated into my everyday language, sometimes correctly, but sometimes incorrectly. This may cause certain shifts in meaning, so I may unwittingly import foreign, undefined terms, possibly using them incorrectly.

Such terms might include “Gegenstandsbildung” (object formation), “Wirkungseinheiten” (units of effect), “Logifizierung” (logification), “Seelenlogik” (logic of the psyche), “Zerdehnung des Augenblicks” (the stretching of the moment), etc.

So if I haven’t understood one or another morphological concept fully and end up using it incorrectly, I might not even realize it – may Salber forgive me. In any case, this notice makes clear that any reader can note the borrowing and investigate these curious terms further. I don’t define these terms here because I trust they will become intuitively evident in the process of reading. Anyone wanting more details should consult Salber, W. (1), “Der psychische Gegenstand” (Bonn 1957) – but please don’t abandon NLPPt on account of that. Here, you can only learn about NLPPt, not about “Morphological Psychology.” If you want to learn the latter, I recommend contacting the “morphologists” in Cologne or Berlin.

Preface Four: Target Audiences

This book addresses various target groups.

The first group is advanced NLP, NLPt, or NLPPt practitioners. This is not an introductory text on NLP; knowledge of NLP is assumed. This book focuses strictly on theory—no new formats, exercises, or small-group work—and I believe the psychotherapeutic branch of NLP has a great need for theoretical development.

The second group, which I hope will also feel addressed, is psychoanalytic psychotherapists. I will make the provocative claim that NLP represents the strongest competitor to psychoanalysis and is the only psychotherapeutic method superior to all others. I’m not asserting this as an NLP practitioner out to sell something; rather, I say it as a psychoanalyst with 30 years of psychotherapy experience.

One might counter that NLP—or the NLPPt presented here—lacks scientifically verified proof of efficacy. That’s true and will remain so in Germany, because the number of people trained in NLPPt who are also licensed as “psychological psychotherapists” or “medical psychotherapists” is, to my knowledge, likely around fifteen individuals nationwide. They can privately practice NLP with patient consent, but their economic means are insufficient to finance large-scale research to meet the standards demanded by the German Federal Government’s scientific advisory boards. Our only hope would be for one of these few licensed psychotherapists to happen upon a sponsor.

The third group addressed here is those involved in “scientific and theoretical psychology.” Exactly for these aficionados, this book attempts to offer a possible meta-theoretical frame of reference to situate every psychotherapeutic school currently on the market. This framework allows psychotherapeutic work to continue as if it all stems from one cohesive overarching system, even if one changes therapeutic methods. Until now, the existing psychotherapeutic approaches have generally acted as if they are independent from one another; yet from within one comprehensive system, we can understand them all as sub-formats of NLPPt.

Indeed, from such a system, one could theoretically derive all formats not yet realized and thus create new approaches. The key is to translate and interlink these various therapy forms, thereby constructing a meta-theory of psychotherapy, a “General Psychotherapy.”

The fourth group might be those seeking the therapeutic mechanism of action— researchers who want to know how, precisely, therapy works.

NLPPt’s goal is not to view psychotherapy as an art. Art cannot be taught or learned. That’s not our direction. We regard NLPPt as an objective, teachable, and learnable method along with its procedures and a discernible mechanism of action.

The fifth group who ought to pay attention here is health policy-makers. The good news in this book is that national therapy costs could be cut by around 70% if NLP (NLPPt) were recognized as a form of psychotherapy covered by insurance. The money saved would likely reach into the billions. It’s about letting health policy-makers know how effective NLPPt is and how quickly it works, enabling them to save a fortune on what would otherwise be spent on classical psychotherapy.

1. Introduction

1.1 The Meta-State of NLP/NLPPt

It is indeed possible to practice psychology or psychotherapy without any prerequisites, but whoever is equipped with a “meta” perspective—knowledge about the theoretical underpinnings (meta-features) of such an undertaking— holds a distinct advantage. This book is difficult to write and to read, because it deals with the age-old topic of how body and psyche interact. It’s easy to drift into the wrong territory. The book inevitably tackles unbelievable observations and statements that might make one think, “Enough is enough – I’m not reading more of this nonsense.” If that happens, it might indicate that you, the reader, are using the wrong meta-position.

You can only understand what I mean if you approach this text consistently from the meta-position of a “neuropsychological perspective.” I must confess that even I, as the author, occasionally lose sight of that meta-position, because the consequences of my actions in therapy and the descriptions I provide sometimes unnerve me. For instance, if I say we “operate with words,” I recoil from my own statement. Yet I have to press on with it, even if it makes me sound crazy. The essential meta-condition pervading this book is that all statements here can only be properly understood from a strictly “neuropsychological point of view” (and no other). This means we must maintain a single guiding principle – our guiding principle – with unyielding resolve. Yes, that’s called being “methodical,” come what may.

We cannot allow philosophers, biologists, educators, empirical social researchers, or even colleagues in the math and natural sciences to define psychology for us. These colleagues all readily chime in—unthinkingly, from an entirely different vantage point. They don’t realize that all their judgments are shaped by the worldview and methodology of their own fields. It’s much like supervision in psychotherapy: A behavior therapist doesn’t seek general supervision; only a behavior therapist well-versed in that method can provide relevant feedback. Meaning: We accept criticism only from those who have true subject-matter expertise.

Anyone who wants to gain something from this book should temporarily disable the standard unreflective settings in their brain (the “factory default” settings we all have). Some people have obstructed their view of the essentials by clinging to everyday prejudices (a mishmash of bio-chemical-physical-psychological perspectives) and by harboring a phobic aversion to any new insight.

To keep that from happening with this book, the reader must consider whether they can, for the limited time they spend reading these pages, adopt a radically one-sided neuropsychological perspective. If they cannot, that’s nearly a disqualifier for continuing. Because in that case, they’re operating under the typical everyday vantage point of Mr. Everybody. From that typical, unreflective everyday perspective, or from the standpoint of pure logic, the NLPPt described here simply appears as nonsense. If the reader arrives at that “this is all nonsense” assessment, they should either set the book aside and never look at it again, or else now dive in even more deeply.

Here’s a quick test to see which group you belong to—the “positive psychology group” or the “negative nonsense group”:

Example: A woman wants to leave her abusive husband but hasn’t been able to do so for years. She is severely depressed and on medication. From a psychological perspective, the connection between her husband and her depression seems obvious. Of course that would be the explanatory context. However, for a neuronally based way of thinking, that context isn’t necessarily confirmed. A psychology-oriented perspective that seeks connections is, from a neuron-oriented position, only a possible speculation. Only the joint firing of brain areas would prove whether there is a psychological or neuronal explanatory relationship. She explains staying with her husband by saying her main aim is to build up the strength to leave; hence, the depression has little to do with it.

I asked her to bring pictures of her husband. She did so. I handed her scissors and asked if she felt like cutting the pictures into pieces. No, she wouldn’t and couldn’t do that. In the third session, she brought all the pictures back because she’d decided she did want to cut them up after all. She cut them up very slowly, then during a brief pause in the session, threw the bits into some wet cement that a construction firm was using about 100 meters away to repair the sidewalk. The healing was immediate. In the same week, she moved into her own small apartment and said goodbye to me in a final, fourth session. The help didn’t arise from cutting up the pictures per se, she said, but from thinking entirely differently now—namely, that she was able to harbor a death wish toward her husband. “He can’t get out of that hard concrete anymore,” that was her death wish. It no longer mattered to her that in biological and physical reality, her husband was still free and walking around. That was another level. She was satisfied with having the freedom to choose her own thought—namely, being able to think of his “death.”

What do you think that was? Psychotherapy or nonsense? What does cutting up pictures and encasing them in concrete have to do with therapy?

Our subject is imagination (Ein-Bildung, literally “in-image-ation”). Where other fields draw the line because “it’s crossing boundaries,” or where for them “esoteric nonsense” begins and is dismissed, that is precisely where our psychology starts to become truly interesting. We are interested in what others contemptuously call “Ein-Bildung”—the act of “placing something into an image.”

Equipped with a physical way of speaking and viewing things, a physicist might measure the temperature as “-4°C.” That’s the correct statement physically. But if they add, “It feels like -11°C,” that’s a psychological, or better yet a neuropsychological, statement. Strictly speaking, the physicist is only responsible for the physical measurement. The question is whether it’s permissible to regard things in any framework other than the purely physical. If that were not allowed, the physicist would have to say, “Statements about ‘felt temperatures’ are invalid from a physical standpoint and, lacking measurability, are unscientific.” That’s possible—yet it leaves us able to see only a portion of reality.

So, how is it? Can we physically step out of our problems so our suffering just disappears—“Yes” or “No?” Psychologically, we can, in a psychological or neuropsychological reality.

Think of the comedy sketch “Dinner for One”: Physically, “Mister Winterbottom” isn’t present, nor are his fellow guests physically there. If we exit the physical reality and move into the psychological reality, then Mister Winterbottom and the other guests are, of course, present. The humor of the piece comes from constantly switching between physical reality and psychological reality. Or could you remove the psychological elements from the sketch without losing its humor?

We perceive the physically unfolding events in our social environment through the five VAKOG/SM channels, and we can then run them as an imaginary film on our inner screens. What was just physical or social reality gets translated into an imaginative, psychological plane via “filming” it in our minds. Telling stories is the defining characteristic of the psyche. What happens in this psychological reality, and what constitutes psychological reality in the first place, is determined solely by psychology. If someone in therapy wants to “step out” of their problems psychologically, we already use the physical word “step out” (“heraustreten” in German) to describe that route. “Stepping out” is an action that implies a direction. Terms like “action” are here employed as “physicalisms” that represent an autonomous psychological reality with an unfulfillable desire for physical materialization—so they remain physicalisms.

“Leave your pain behind you”: “behind you” initially prompts the action of “writing down the pain” and then “throwing the piece of paper behind you.” That works on a physical level too, but physically it has only a physical (not a psychological) effect. From the standpoint of physicalisms, the psychological effect would be immediate and seamless. For psychology and psychotherapy, it’s about realizing and/or managing imaginings (Ein-Bild-Ungen) on a psychological level. We can create psychological “imaginings,” which then become “imagined realities” (ein-durch-Bildung-ge-bild-et—literally “formed by way of an image”), and thus they become realities—psychological realities—i.e., psychologically triggered attempts at materialization, which thereby become the neuropsychological object of our research.

Is all of psychology just a bluff—an act of imagination (Bildung, an “image-making”)? Yes, it is—an inner image we create. And we love our imaginings. Though they can’t be physically seen, they are psychologically visible as daydreams—they’re always there for us. They exist even if they don’t physically exist.

That’s the crux of the matter. We engage with psychological reality as a reality just as real as physical reality.

NLPPt’s psychology uses physical reality and physical language to describe its states. In so doing, it produces physics-adjacent terms—physicalisms—that capture the work translated into the psychic realm as a reality analogous (yet only analogous) to physics.

Psychologists can’t really make statements of expertise about other professions—since in those domains, they’re not the experts.

It’s the same in psychology. Anyone ignorant of psychological reality shouldn’t talk much about it. Even more so: if one has no background knowledge of “Reiki,” one probably shouldn’t venture an opinion on the therapeutic value of Reiki. The reverse is also true. Whatever a physicist says about a physical phenomenon remains a physically justified statement. If a psychologist comments on that same physical event, that remark can only be psychological or layperson-level. So it’s better if they refrain from such commentary altogether.

And so the challenge to the physicist is not to interpret psychological phenomena through a physical lens but only through an analogy-to-physics lens.

1.2 NLP – No Thank You

I was once courted by an NLP trainer to participate in a continuing education program for a global corporation. However, before I was allowed any contact with the corporation’s training department, I was admonished never to use the acronym “NLP” or the term “Neuro-Linguistic Programming.” Otherwise, I couldn’t be involved. This, despite the fact that most managerial seminars in truth teach straight-up NLP. And employees on the lower rungs often attend NLP seminars as well. In the end, some participants want both the official DVNLP certificate and a second certificate—often a simple certificate of attendance without any mention of NLP—that they can present to the HR department.

It seems that although many people are interested in NLP, few want to be publicly identified as belonging to the NLP family. Here’s an overheard snippet from a pleasant small-talk session: “Oh, is that so, NLP (?), I want nothing to do with that. No way, not us, that’s pure manipulation. Totally unscientific, after all. It all originates from Scientology—yes indeed, NLP practitioners and Scientologists are basically the same. Or was it esoteric types? Spiritualists? Anyway, we have nothing to do with that. Nope, that’s them, not us.”

Though NLP may be frowned upon, its terminology has been appearing more frequently in many areas of life since around the millennium, including politics. In politics, everyone has been strangely “well positioned” for the past few years—likely some variant of “systemic constellation work” (a technique associated with NLP and related theoretical fields). Today, everyone’s not just active but “proactive.”

It’s also odd that for several years now, we’ve talked about “formats” on TV—another important NLP term. During the 2017 German federal election campaign, we heard that Ms. Merkel did quite well with the “format” of public Q&A. Previously, in German, the term “Format” basically referred only to paper sizes. Teachers would say, “Please bring a notebook in DIN A4 format to class next time.” After NLP spread the word “format” in its seminars, participants carried it out into the world. TV producers picked it up, and now we speak casually about all sorts of “formats.”

Even in psychotherapeutic publications, one repeatedly finds NLP strategies, ideas, and formats, which is not a bad thing at all—indeed, it’s pleasing—except that the original source is rarely mentioned, and the author doesn’t reveal they’re a descendant of NLP. So even among psychotherapists, who pride themselves on exposing the truth and practicing self-reflection, something is being hidden or repressed. And that in a profession normally committed to transparency!

1.3 NLP – A Quarry of Great Ideas

NLP seems to offer valuable tools. I can’t explain otherwise why I repeatedly see thefts of NLP’s intellectual property. A typical example is a publication whose title, for legal reasons, I cannot recall. It apparently achieved wide circulation with minimal advertising. The contents are essentially a list of individual psychological tips, which in fact are just slightly reworked elements of the “Meta Model of language.” The troubling thing is that science lets that slip by without consequence. We know the saying: “The truth needs someone to speak it.” Or as the German band “Die Prinzen” sings, “It’s all just stolen… yes, I helped myself to it.”

1.4 NLP – A Small-Talk Topic

In psychotherapeutic circles, one can show how well-educated one is by casually remarking that NLP is unscientific nonsense, worthless esotericism, magic, or Scientology-based thinking. This is a judgment made before the speaker has gathered any real knowledge—thus, literally, it’s prejudice. A conversation in my family circle went: “Oh, you do NLP! So you want to manipulate people? And your courses aren’t going so well? Great. If I were you, as a psychoanalyst, I’d sure want to think about why.”

1.5 NLP – Affiliation Hurts Your Reputation

I’ve heard it multiple times: “But you’re a psychoanalyst. How can you be interested in NLP?” They are reminding me that as an analyst, one is automatically sworn to a certain loftier affiliation—that we’ve effectively taken a psychoanalytic oath of office and remain bound to the psychoanalytic vow of celibacy. A meta program is triggered: “We are here, and those people are over there, our enemies,” leading to a ban on thinking or evolving. (This is an impermissible coupling of “positive intention” with “negative behavior” (a Six-Step Reframing in reverse)). Bans on thinking are signs of an unscientific naivete that, unfortunately, has also become a hallmark of psychoanalysis—the same psychoanalysis that, a hundred years ago, was itself a revolutionary specter. But as the saying goes, revolutions devour their own children.

Regarding psychoanalysis, it’s quite obvious it’s out of date today. What was once revolutionary is now a compulsive, neurotic network of words and phrases that has exhausted its potential for development.

Students in advanced-level high-school psychology or pedagogy classes can confirm this. Freud’s model of the psyche is something they can study, memorize, and pass exams on, but it often leaves them feeling it’s antiquated, superficial, and somewhat comical. It reflects a time when Freud dared not write that he’d seen his mother naked, so he used the Latin “nudam.” This doesn’t mesh well with our modern era.

1.6 NLP – In the Hands of Laypeople

The claim arises that not psychologists, not doctors, but possibly a craftsperson, a civil servant, or an unemployed individual could just as effectively—or even more effectively—perform NLP-based programming than psychotherapists or physicians. This issue was already hotly debated among Austrian psychoanalysts in the early 1920s. Freud advocated for lay analysis, i.e., the practice of psychoanalytic treatments by “non-physicians.” Freud even believed that having a preliminary medical education could negatively impact one’s work as a psychoanalyst. (See Freud, Sigmund, IX, On the Question of Lay Analysis, 1926).

The analogous question today is: “Should there be concerns about NLP coaching or NLPt therapy being conducted by laypeople?” I have seen NLP-trained individuals, who originally worked in trades and were neither psychologists nor doctors, successfully deliver extremely powerful NLP coaching, outdoing medical practitioners and psychotherapists.

Since about 95% of NLP is practiced by laypeople, the medical establishment can only conclude that if this approach can be applied by laypeople, it cannot be a recognized medical procedure. But if it nonetheless turned out to be a genuine healing method, then it would have to be wrested away from its current practitioners and immediately transferred to the medical sector—and those existing practitioners would, in a revolutionary step, need to be granted a license. Due to these legal uncertainties, the word “psychotherapy” is generally avoided in the NLP field. This avoidance conveniently fits with the stance of the fiercest NLP critics, who do not even see NLP as psychology, let alone psychotherapy. The naive logic: “If it doesn’t say psychotherapy on the label, it can’t contain psychotherapy.”

Lay analysis and training analysis are not the same. Lay analysis is analysis conducted by non-professionals. Training analysis is the form of analysis used to train future psychoanalysts.

Let’s apply this idea to NLPPt:

Lay programming and instructional programming are not the same thing. Lay programming is the practice of conducting programming by non-professionals. Instructional programming is the experiential practice the trainee undergoes for learning purposes.

1.7 NLP – Market Leader in Coaching

NLP, even without external support, is currently the most modern and effective tool in the fields of psychology, psychotherapy, communication, and coaching. Especially in coaching—i.e., psychotherapy with people who are essentially healthy—NLP quietly holds a leading position. For a few years now, psychoanalytic associations and regulatory-therapy societies, faced with falling enrollment, have tried to expand into the coaching market (one-on-one coaching and corporate consulting). There, they run up against the market leader, NLP (DVNLP).

1.8 The Next Generation in NLP and in Psychoanalytic Training Institutes

In the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, countless applicants to training programs were turned away because the institutes were over capacity. Today, the situation is different. The psychoanalytic schools are experiencing a decline in enrollment—a “vote with one’s feet,” so to speak. Quoting: “The drop in new recruits for psychoanalysis is a common concern for many psychoanalytic organizations. Meanwhile, behavior therapy approaches have become widely popular under the label ‘evidence-based therapy,’ with far-reaching consequences for university teaching” (Lebiger-Vogel, ibid., p. 347).

1.9 Rumors About NLP and Psychoanalysis

Over the last 100 years, psychoanalysis has been discussed and rehashed by all sorts of media (often inaccurately), so it’s now considered part of basic cultural knowledge that one “has” some unconscious Oedipus complex or a fear of commitment. It’s almost shameful these days to say, “I feel mentally healthy.” That can’t be right—it just reveals profound resistance, the sign of a prematurely abandoned training analysis. Surely you must go back into therapy or at least supervision. One can sense the absurdity of the inflated use of specialized terms. The German a-cappella group Basta makes fun of this by ironically singing to the audience: “I have commitment issues.” Anyone who can joke like that certainly no longer suffers from it; they’ve effectively dissolved the label.

1.10 Linguistic Loftiness (Semantic Closedness) in Psychoanalysis

Let’s take a closer look at the scientific rigor of psychoanalysis’s theoretical language with some literature. I grab a random psychoanalytic book from my bookshelf; what is it? Otto F. Kernberg (1990). Kernberg is a psychiatrist living in the U.S., a globally renowned figure in psychoanalytic therapy, and the originator of object relations theory. I open to some random page—page 84—and read the following text from Kernberg as though testing it for “scientific merit”:

Quote: “Menninger (1959) examined the significance of hope as a fundamental human drive and described it as an expression of the life drive in opposition to forces of destructiveness and self-destructiveness. According to Money-Kyrle (1956), the analyst’s concern for the patient’s well-being stems from reparation drives against the analyst’s own early destructive tendencies, as well as from his identifications with his parents. … Winnicott (1963) believes that concern for other people arises from redirected feelings of guilt. He says that a child’s development of this ability depends on successfully working through multiple cycles of aggression, guilt, and reparation.” (Kernberg, ibid., p. 84)

Did you understand that? I didn’t—not on the first pass. You get the impression it’s all wild speculation and construction, without the sense of a real underlying story being reported.

Freud, on the other hand, in “Freud V,” ibid., p. 56: “The mother stepped out for a time, and Anna sat at the sickbed, her right arm draped over the back of the chair. She entered a waking-dream state and saw a black snake coming off the wall, approaching the patient to bite him.… She wanted to drive the creature away, but felt paralyzed; the right arm that hung over the chair’s back had gone numb, … and when she looked at it, her fingers turned into little snakes with skulls for heads (fingernails).” Do you see the difference between these two levels of language? One is speculation from eminent thinkers in old age; the other is describing a concrete, everyday event.

We hear about “scientific findings” without any information about the process used to obtain them. And we sense these theorists talking among themselves, holding some sort of grudge against the colleague who works with “real” material. As written, it’s just suppositions, constructs, assumptions, beliefs, and wild interpretations. The psychoanalyst is always under pressure to offer some explanation or “meaning” for any emerging topic. The right approach would be to let the case material speak. But the analyst wants to prove something and invents adventurous stories. That is the core error: focusing on theoretical thinking means you no longer let the material speak but spin a self-contained theoretical tale instead.

Money-Kyrle (see above) doesn’t say how he arrived at his conclusion. He just states that the analyst’s concern for the patient has nothing to do with the patient. Rather, it’s driven by a need for reparation in response to the analyst’s destructive childhood tendencies, along with certain identifications with the parents that must have played an unclear role. And Winnicott is also not so sure—he “assumes” (yes, only assumes!)—that the analyst’s concern comes from successfully working through many cycles of aggression, guilt, and reparation, but he can’t prove it. So he merely assumes. It’s our own belief that it all traces back to a traumatic childhood. By what controlled, explicit protocols did Money-Kyrle arrive at these pseudo-scientific insights? By the “scientific principle of mere claim,” it seems.

I sometimes hear from my own patients that at their other therapist’s office—the one who uses a psychoanalytic approach—they experience the sort of theorizing exemplified above. We need to realize that such non-empirically supported speculation is considered “scientific” in psychoanalysis—and that a discipline so tragically unscientific can bill insurers, while NLPPt (NLP-based therapy), with its demonstrable five therapeutic senses, may not.

Are you following this? Beliefs upon beliefs! Everything psychoanalysis says is considered “science,” while NLPPt, grounded in the verifiable operation of those five senses, is dismissed as esoteric. The world truly stands on its head once again.

1.11 NLP and NLPPt at the University?

In 2019, a law was passed to anchor psychotherapy training in universities and thus place it under public control. On one hand, that’s a positive step to end the shenanigans of some private providers; on the other, it’s likely to lower the quality of psychotherapist training—much like the economy. Civil servants know little about construction; it’s best left to private businesses. Now, this “public service” is set to take over training therapists, which will inevitably yield a “government-service” level of output—nothing more. Genuine personal commitment will fall by the wayside, and therapeutic standards will decline.

When therapy training moves to universities, it places training in the hands of theoretically oriented professors, not in the hands of practically oriented, full-time psychotherapists who may be less into theory but are actually experienced clinicians. A layperson might not realize a university professor of psychotherapy probably has never run a private practice with patients but has spent a career thinking about psychotherapy theoretically. Now these non-practitioners will train future therapists in real-world practice?

And one might wonder whether this development will help NLPt’s standing at all—whether, in the course of state-run training, NLPt might finally gain more recognition or representation. I suspect it will remain a pipe dream. The new professorships will be given out 90% to the representative schools of the recognized procedures (behavior therapists and psychoanalysts).

1.12 Where Does the Rejection of NLP Come From?

It’s truly strange that a method as effective as NLP is so fiercely rejected. You could blame it on certain leading NLP figures whose dubious behavior (those big “Tschakka-Tschakka” mass rallies) and profit-seeking have given NLP a questionable reputation. But that explanation is too limited. There are black sheep in every field, and usually things balance out over time—but not here.

No, it’s more likely to do with a completely new paradigm that stirs anxiety. I suspect that widespread rejection of NLP can be seen as a continuation of those “three great narcissistic injuries of humanity” Freud spoke of: According to Freud, the first insult to humanity was Copernicus/Galileo showing that Earth was not at the center of the universe (i.e., we aren’t so crucial to God as we thought). The second was Darwin: we are not the specially molded descendants of Adam and Eve but simply subject to evolution and descended from apes. The third injury was realizing that humans are not governed by consciousness but by our unconscious.

Perhaps NLP is carrying on this chain of insults or anxieties—an increased sense that “anything might be possible.” That sense of absolute feasibility applies to all of us, which is disconcerting. It reveals that we really are just “water with a skeleton.” Big changes are coming: neuroscientists are working on preserving the brains of terminally ill patients through cryogenics, then thawing them without loss of function, and implanting them into other terminally ill patients.

Supposedly, this has already been done with animals, whose “psychological” traits and other characteristics remained intact—leading us to suspect that even our subtle psychic factors must be physically located somewhere in the brain (in the synapses?). The next step will be scanning brains, printing them in 3D, and implanting them into another human body.

The crux is whether purely psychological traits will survive this procedure intact or not. Two possibilities: The mental aspects are transient and dissolve, or they remain intact—meaning they must have been stored in the synapses.

This neural-psychic picture finally clarifies that what we proudly call “humanity” is just water plus a few synapses. The psyche converts into the neuronal. Perhaps we sense we’re moving in that direction.

It’s similar when therapy yields fast results—in two to five sessions. The patient is delighted, yet also finds me suspicious because of the rapid success. I recall a “Fast Phobia Cure” demonstration in a Master course. After just seven minutes, we had a dramatic success. The course participants showed more concern than excitement—fearful of being exposed to an external power.

So, although we gain feasibility (“machbarkeit”), we’re all already unconsciously being directed by a program. This is a paradox: Theoretically, there’s a contradiction between NLP-supported feasibility and the primarily “operational closedness” of the “neuronal system.” The resolution of this contradiction: Everything is possible, but only during the time window of “operational openness,” which we can’t predict. We have to wait for chance, or for whatever reason, to open that window. Therapeutic measures can create additional open periods.

I encounter people daily who disclaim all responsibility for their actions. Knowing about our programming, one can choose to refuse responsibility for one’s behavior. We may be directed by the unconscious, yet we have all the resources within ourselves to change our programming in spite of the resistance to altering it. Format: Ask yourself what you’re willing to learn to reclaim your responsibility. It’s about taking on a sliver of self-responsibility. In Cologne dialect: “Arsch huh, Zäng ussenander!” (roughly “Get off your butt, spread those tongs!”). NLP’s critics sense that they don’t want to put in the effort to leave the warm bed of a bad childhood and an unaccountable life. They prefer to retain the belief systems of their current comfort zone. Embracing NLP doesn’t mean freedom from work; on the contrary, it means hard work on oneself.

NLP is often rumored to promise quick behavioral changes and easy successes. That’s a misconception. NLP only promises success if you are willing to do whatever it takes and never give up. That’s where the misunderstanding arises: People only hear that NLP can bring success. They miss the part about requiring steady, sustained effort. When someone who isn’t prepared to put in the work sees no results, they will say NLP doesn’t deliver.