Nearly a hundred years ago Sigmund Freud
revolutionized human understanding with the publication of his theories on the
structure of the human psyche. He proposed that human consciousness was divided
into the comparatively small conscious mind and the vast, unknown realm of the
unconscious; and that the human identity was composed of an Id, an Ego and a
Superego. He then described how these developed through the early years of
life. Thus psychoanalysis was born.
Freud’s theories were so deeply
controversial that it was not long before psychoanalysis began to fragment and
change, and the forms in which it is practiced today bear little relation to
the psychoanalysis that Freud created.
Where Freud’s stress on sexuality and his
rift with Jung are well known, what is less well known is the fact that
psychoanalysis was born out of the use of hypnosis as a way of gaining access
to the unconscious. One of the very first changes in psychoanalysis was Freud’s
own abandonment of hypnosis in favour of free association.
Freud himself acknowledged that he was not
a great therapist. He did have some remarkable results in his career, but his
true strength was in research. Other therapists over the years have probably
achieved greater personal results, but no system has ever provided a more
compelling description of the human psyche.
However, in the early 1970s John Grinder
and Richard Bandler launched what was to become the most startling and
controversial development in psychology since psychoanalysis. This was neuro-linguistic
programming. For the first time since the birth of psychology there was a
description of the human psyche which was as compelling and startling (if not
as complete) as Freud’s. Grinder and Bandler described the human psyche in
terms of language, drawing heavily on Noam Chomsky’s theory of transformational
grammar, and in terms of five representational systems. The result was
explosive.
Over the next two decades NLP was to take
the world by storm. Having been designed as a complement to other forms of
psychotherapy, it rapidly became a form of therapy in its own right; but it
also went well beyond therapy and was assimilated into education, marketing,
sales, politics and even the military and law enforcement. NLP boasted two
things above all else: it was incredibly fast, and it was reliable and
predictable in its results. Two claims that no other branch of psychology could
make.
Needless to say these claims are widely
disputed among the ivory towers of psychology; but not, interestingly enough,
in those non-academic and non-therapy fields where it was assimilated. In my
own practice I have found it to be profoundly effective.
So, where psychoanalysis provided a deep
insight into the human soul, but lacked the technologies to bring about
effective and lasting change, NLP provided powerful and dynamic tools for
change but lacked the depth of focused understanding that psychoanalysis could
bring. To me, they looked just like the two complementary parts of a whole. And
so Neuro-Linguistic Analysis was born.
