NLP and the Human Potential Movement #4 QUESTIONS ABOUT NLP S HUMAN POTENTIAL MOVEMENT HISTORY L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. After writing three articles for publication here in Resource Magazine and after writing two books on self-actualization, Unleashed: A Guide to Your Ultimate Self-Actualization (2007) and Self-Actualization Psychology (2008), numerous people in NLP have raised various questions about the history of NLP. In fact, in the last Resource (Feb. 2008) C. Shola Arewa raised a number of questions challenging some of the things I wrote. 1 I appreciate this because it calls attention to our NLP history, a history rooted in the first Human Potential Movement. What was the Human Potential Movement anyway? The movement was not designated the human potential movement until 1965. That s when Michael Murphy and George Leonard came up with that name. Both had been a part of the civil rights movement and thought that the exploration into human potentialities needed a movement. This came from Aldous Huxley who spoken about and lectured on human potentialities, the very lectures that inspired the early Esalen. But prior to that, in fact, a long time before that Maslow began his modeling project of selfactualizers in the late 1930s and continued through the 1940s and 1950s. Carl Rogers work, which essentially created counseling as a field apart from psychotherapy, began with the publication of his work on client-centered counseling in 1941. Maslow s most common description and name for this movement was Third Force psychology, but he also called it Growth Psychology, Positive Psychology, Self-Actualization Psychology, and Humanistic Psychology. And what was the movement? Maslow described it as involving all of the voices of people who were wanting a psychology of health and wellness beyond Behaviorism and Psychoanalysis the 1
first two forces in psychology. Maslow said that Force was epi-freudian and epi-behaviorism, meaning that it was not anti-freudian or anti-behaviorism, but would build upon them and then move to the next level. By the mid-1950s and early 1960s, Third Force psychology was led by Maslow, Rogers, Rollo May, Erick Fromm, Aldous Huxley, Viktor Frankl and would come to include Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Robert Assagioli, Sydney Jourard, and many more. And during that time the Maslow and Rogers hosted Conferences on Third Force Psychology at the universities where they taught. What really happened to the Human Potential Movement? I used the metaphor and terminology of death about the movement asserting that the movement as a movement died. I did that purposely to call attention that Third Force Psychology as the force launched by Maslow and Rogers in the 1940s and 1950s that movement as such no longer exists. What really happened to it? It dissipated into dozens and dozens of fields, movement, and domains. It dissipated into Humanistic Psychology, into Transpersonal Psychology, into Brief Psychotherapy, into Solution Focus, Ericksonian, Gestalt, NLP, and the list goes on and on. And why or how do I assert such? Mostly because the main leaders in the movement died and left no successor. Maslow viewed Michael Murphy as the son he never had and Murphy along with Richard Price established Esalen for a study of Human Potentialities in 1962, but as noted by biographers of Esalen, the original wild days of Esalen ended in 1970 with the death of Fritz Perls, Abraham Maslow, and James Pike By 1970 Esalen had turned a corner and ended an era. James Pike, Fritz Perls, and Abe Maslow all died in 1969 or 170. Both Dick Price s and Mike Murphy s fathers, moreover, both passed away in 1969 as well. A year later, both founders turned forty. The institutional impact of all of this was quite real. The deaths of these various mentors, Anderson observes, had the effect of sealing off the previous decade into the irrecoverable past. (Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, p. 269) Kripal s massive 2007 work Esalen describes how several of the leaders at that time from Perls and Gestalt, to Schulz and encounter groups, to psychosynthesis etc. tried to capture the flag of Esalen in order that they and their approach would be the primary force guiding the movement, but no one captured the flag. The individualism of the leaders kept them in conflict with one another effectively preventing the kind of collaboration that was needed. Perls conflicted with everyone from Maslow, to Murphy, to Price, to Schutz, etc. As a result no one stepped up to take the mantle of leadership when Maslow died. Not Everett Shostrum, not James Bugental, no one. Nor is this just my conclusion. As I quote in Self- Actualization Psychology, many people during the 1980s were issuing warnings that the movement was in grave danger of imploding and by the late 1980s they were saying that the movement was all but gone. 2
And where did it go? It went into other disciplines and fields as Arewa noted. It dispersed. It dissipated so that each of the subgroups took the ideas and premises of Maslow the first psychologist to conduct a specific and extended study of healthy people regarding the development of human potentialities. But the movement as a movement was, and is, gone. Yes Esalen is still around, but as both biographers Kripal and Walter Truett Anderson noted, Esalen changed directions almost each decade and is no longer the mecca of the HPM that it was. What is left over from the first Human Potential Movement There is the form that s in the Humanistic Psychology movement. Maslow launched the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 1962. There is the form of Transpersonal Psychology, which again, Maslow launched in 1965. There is the Human Development Movement in Mexico which Juan Lafarga Corona started in the 1970s. As a colleague of Carl Rogers, a psychologist and a Jesuit priest, Lafarga translated most of Rogers work into Spanish. He also started a movement there, one that continues to this day in Mexico. But it is not the same Human Potential Movement that existed in the 1960s and 1970s. The Human Development Movement is mostly comprised of Gestalt therapy, Clientcentered therapy, as well as other therapies that promote the development of the human condition. 2 There is the NLP take off, the Ericksonian, the Brief Psychotherapies, Neuro-Semantics, and the list goes on and on. There are many versions and derivatives from the original movement, but no movement. Until I dug into this history, I really had no idea that this was the original source of NLP and the NLP Presuppositions. And I would guess that this is true for the great majority of NLP people as well as people in these other domains. Third Force Psychology Obviously, the principles and premises of Third Force psychology continues today and is well and alive. That has never died and I never suggested that. What is not well and alive is the movement of Third Force. What is not alive and well is a focused cooperation and collaboration of those who leading out in this area. There are no longer any Conferences of the Human Potential Movement as Maslow and Rogers once sponsored. This brings me back to one of the primary points I attempted to make in the three articles. Namely, because the founders of NLP did not acknowledge the larger movement within which Bateson, Perls, Satir, and Erickson worked, they did not ground NLP in this larger frame. And by not recognizing sources, it created the crazy identity-crisis that NLP has suffered from the beginning. By reconnecting NLP to Third Force psychology, we are now able to recognize what NLP is. And what is it? NLP is the how to of the first Human Potential Movement. By modeling what some of the leaders of the HPM were doing and how they were unleashing potentials, NLP modeled out some of the processes and their structure. So what NLP is at its heart and essence is the how of the development of human potentialities via Perls, Satir, and Bateson. 3
Yes, NLP is a communication model, that was the first model that Bandler and Grinder created from Perls and Satir, but communication for what? About what? It was the communication that these HPM leaders were using to bring out the highest and best in people. It was selfactualization communication that would empower people with clarity and precision about their problems and outcomes. Regarding the charge that I criticized criticism and then criticized the HPM and NLP, I think it important to note that I wrote nothing about criticism itself being bad and wrong, but that there was some ruthless and personal criticism against Maslow and Rogers that I thought was destructive to the movement. I have nothing against the nominalization criticism as such. I made a critique of the HPM and examined what caused the movement as a movement to end and dissipate so that it does not exist as a movement today. Criticism as a critique of the strengths and weaknesses of a person or a movement is simply how we try to assess the variables that contribute to an experience. In other writings (www.selfactualizing.com) I have noted the raw individualism in Carl Rogers, Will Schulz, and others. This seems to be a key thought virus that led to the dissipation of the movement. Yes, the good news is that today the premises of Third Force Psychology Self-Actualization Psychology is alive and well in scores and scores of disciplines and areas. In NLP we call them the NLP Presuppositions. But they are much, much wider than NLP. They are descriptions of the positive psychology that Maslow launched. We can all celebrate that achievement. What continues to undermine this, however, is the rugged individualism, the refusal to acknowledge sources, and the lack of collaboration. I recently read an introduction to Positive Psychology and in the first 160 pages, the author mentioned Maslow once and only in passing as if Maslow had not launched the whole study into positive psychology and had established the very premises of positive psychology in the 1940s. It is that kind of un-professionalism that continues to plague our field. The learnings from the research of what happened to some a wonderful and dynamic movement has many warnings for us today. It speaks to us about acknowledging sources, getting the ego out of the way, collaborating, operating from abundance instead of scarcity, and being more inclusive. For that Maslow was a tremendous example. Author: L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. is the founder of Neuro-Semantics and developer of the models that currently define Neuro-Semantics including the Meta-States model, the Matrix model, the Self-Actualization Quadrants, and co-developer with Michelle Duval of the Axes of Change model and the Meta-Coach Training System. He co-founded the International Society of Neuro-Semantics with Bob Bodenhamer which now is governed by a leadership team. End Notes: 4
1. For the newest developments in Neuro-Semantics about Self-Actualization, see www.selfactualizing.org. The first book on Self-Actualization from an NLP perspective is Unleashed: A Guide to Your Ultimate Psychology. (2007). The second book Self-Actualization Psychology (2008). The third in this series will be Achieving Peak Performance, the fourth, Self- Actualization Leaders and Companies. See the websites for Neuro-Semantics: www.neurosemantics.com www.neuro-semantics-trainings.com; www.self-actualizing.org; www.meta-coaching.org. 2. In February 2008 I had the privilege of meeting Juan Lafarga Corona in Mexico City and learning more about the movement that he initiated in Mexico. References: Anderson, Walter Truett. (1983). The upstart spring: Esalen and the American awakening. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. Compton, William C. (2005). An introduction to positive psychology. Belmont CA: Thomson Wadsworth. Hall, L. Michael. (2007 in press). Unleashed: A guide for your ultimate self-actualization. Kripal, Jeffrey J. (2007). Esalen: America and the religion of no religion. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Maslow, Abraham. (1970). Motivation and Personality. (2 nd ed.). New York: Harper & Row. Maslow, Abraham. (1968). Toward a Psychology of Being. New York: Van Nostrand. Maslow, Abraham. (1953, 1971). The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. New York: Viking. 5