You are visiting the website of MICHAEL HEAP
To return to Home Page click Home Page.
Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) is one of a plethora of therapies that have appeared from the 1970s onwards, many originating in the USA. There were a number of reasons for their emergence at that time, notably disaffection with the prevailing orthodoxy in mainstream (i.e. medically-dominated) psychotherapy in the USA, namely psychoanalysis. (We may also include the 'client-centred' approach espoused by Carl Rogers.) The reasons for this were the slow pace of psychoanalysis, its very lengthy timescale, and doubts about its theoretical underpinnings and efficacy. One should never, however, underestimate the importance of another influence, namely the increasing reluctance of medical insurers in the USA to fund lengthy courses of psychotherapy.
In these newer therapies, unlike the psychoanalyst the practitioner is actively engaged in the application of techniques presumed to facilitate the changes that person is seeking. By far and away the most successful mainstream development has been cognitive therapy. (Behaviour therapy already existed but, in the US at least, it was not so influential and was rather limited in scope. It has however proved to be a potent ally of cognitive therapy and now 'cognitive-behaviour therapy' is, in many quarters, regarded as the orthodox approach to wide a range of psychiatric disorders, not uncommonly in conjunction with medication.) When, at the beginning of the 1980s, I joined the stampede and did some training in NLP, the sole promotional message of the books and courses was that it was an extraordinarily fast, almost miraculous therapy – hence the books entitled Frogs into Princes, The Structure of Magic, and They Lived Happily Ever After. The inventors of NLP made the strong claim that the ideas and practices were distilled from their observations of American therapists who had a reputation for obtaining quick and effective results, usually by 'strategic' methods or hypnosis.
Some years later I wrote some articles reviewing research that discredited NLP claims concerning the representation of sensory modalities in language and their relation to ocular gaze. I notice that these ideas are still peddled in the NLP literature, as is the inappropriate hype concerning the influence on rapport of verbal and postural matching and similar ploys. However, I have not had much to do with NLP in recent years: predictably it has gone where the money is, namely management training, 'life coaching', etc.
I have uploaded two articles that I authored on NLP in the 1980s. They are all in pdf format and I apologise that some of the pages have been scanned rather lopsidedly. To access any of them simply click on the title. The papers are as follows:
The third article, below, has been temporarily withdrawn from the website to create more space and will be replaced in html format in due course. In the meantime it is avalable by emailing me on mailto:m.heap@sheffield.ac.uk
Heap, M. (1989) Neurolinguistic programming: What is the evidence? In D. Waxman, D. Pedersen, I. Wilkie & P. Mellett (Eds.) Hypnosis: The Fourth European Congress at Oxford. London: Whurr Publishers, pp 118-124.For a sceptical up-to-date account of NLP go to the Wikipedia website .
If you have any comments about these papers please click Comments Page.
To return to the top of this page click Top of page