A Brief History Of Psychotherapy For NLP Practitioners

© Richard Bolstad, Member NZ Association of Psychotherapists, 1993, 2021

This overview of the main schools of Psychotherapy, and set of comments on the general failure of Psychotherapists to achieve the outcomes they intend, emerged out of my own process of clarifying why I chose to become an “NLP Consultant”, three decades ago. I still consider it a useful introduction for those new to either NLP or Psychotherapy.

I’ll simplify this overview of Psychotherapy by grouping the vast range of possibilities into eleven main areas. Although I’ve read key books by virtually all the Psychotherapists I’ll mention, I only have first hand experience as a client with Primal Therapy, Rebirthing, Co-counselling, Action methods, Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, Client Centred Therapy, Family Therapy, Hypnotherapy, IEMT, NLP and Counselling (Carkhuff model). As a Therapist, my experience is primarily with Counselling (Carkhuff/Egan model), Gestalt, Hypnotherapy and NLP. The eleven groups I’ll discuss are related historically thus:

Hypnotherapy: Developers include Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815)   Animal Magnetism,  James Braid (1755-1819) Hypnotism, Hippolyte Bernheim (1840-1919) Suggestive Therapeutics, Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893), Pierre Janet (1849-1947). Other theorists include Sigmund Freud, Ivan Pavlov, Andre Weitzenhoffer, Leslie Le Cron, Milton Erickson.  In traditional Hypnotherapy the therapist induces a trance state in order to communicate directly with the person’s unconscious mind. Mesmer considered the trance secondary to the induction of an enhanced magnetic field around the person. Braid separated out this element, suggesting that Hypnosis was a form of sleep. Charcot considered hypnosis a model of the process causing “hysteria”, and Freud and Breuer used the trance to enable the person to relive a traumatic event, being healed by the catharsis (release of repressed feeling). Le Cron developed the use of ideomotor signals (eg finger signals/ the Chevreul pendulum). Milton Erickson developed a co-operative rather than a directive method of utilising the individual client’s responses and trance phenomena. He himself had studied hypnotherapy with the behaviourist Clark Hull. Note that the entire history of psychotherapy in the West originates with hypnotherapy.

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: Developers include Sigmund Freud (1836-1939) Psychoanalysis, Theodor Reik (1888-1969) , Alfred Adler (1879-1937), Individual Psychology, Carl Jung (1875-1961) Analytic Psychology,  Otto Rank (1884-1939) Will Therapy , Sandor Ferenczi (1873-1933), Anna Freud (1895-1982)  . These people were Freud’s “inner circle”. They each went their own way. A later generation of therapists often called Neo-Freudians were trained by the earlier therapists. Some set up their own schools of therapy, while others form the “Freudian mainstream”  today.Freud developed this model after abandoning his earlier use of hypnosis to heal childhood trauma. One of his reasons was that he began to believe that the trauma his patients reported were not so much real events (eg incest) but the results of hidden inner drives (such as the desire for incest). Therapy based on the exploration of these inner ‘dynamics’ fits in this category. Psychodynamic Psychotherapy  uses techniques such as having the person talk in “free Association” style, to bring up material from the internal dynamics of the mind (the inner forces such as “id” “, superego” and “ego” ). The therapist is able to identify and interpret such material from the person’s resistances (eg what they avoid talking about) and their transference behaviour (the way they relate to the therapist is considered often to be transfered from the way they related to their early caregivers). Later therapists include Erich Fromm (1900-1980), Karen Horney (1885-1952), Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949) Participant Observation, Eric Berne (1920-1970) Transactional Analysis (where the inner dynamics explored are the ego states given the simpler names “Parent”, “Adult” and “Child”), Eric Erickson (1902-?), and Melanie Klein (1882-1960). Klein was the developer of Object Relations Theory which studies the internal dynamics formed as a result of the very young child’s attempt to identify “self” and other “objects” and deal with them. This is now the central trend, represented by theorists such as Otto Kernberg.

Transpersonal Therapy: While Freud and his inner circle were still working in Vienna, in Switzerland Karl Jung (1875-1961) Analytic Psychotherapy, and in Italy Roberto Assagioli (1888-1975) Psychosynthesis,  were widening the scope of psychotherapy, and ended up distancing themselves from Freud. The interest in the more spiritual implications of psychotherapy was present before Freud’s writing, in the work of William James (1842-1910). James identified the importance of sensory system preferences (visual, auditory, tactile and articulatory) and submodalities, in his seminal work “Psychology” in 1890. The transpersonal psychotherapies see the person’s task as being the integration of subpersonalities or archetypes, and the journey towards what Jung called Individuation and Assagioli called Spiritual Psychosynthesis: a state of spiritual unity with the collective unconscious or superconscious mind. Some of the more recent “Process therapies” have clear links to Jung and Assagioli. Examples are Arnold Mindell’s Process Therapy and Ron Kurtz’ Hakomi. Many of themodels used in NLP to explain internal processing are also used in the Transpersonal therapies.Assagioli believed people were primarily Visual,  Auditory, Kinesthetic, Tactile, Olfactory or Gustatory in their way of experiencing the world. His change techniques clearly suggest NLP‘s anchoring and parts integration. Mindell calls the sensory systems channels, and uses them too. The parts model in NLP is very similar to the subpersonality model, and NLP has borrowed and built on the personality typing model of Jung (Introvert/Extravert, Thinker/Feeler, Sensor/Intuitor).   

Behaviour Therapy and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT): Meanwhile, the Behaviour therapists were attempting to narrow the focus and chunk down more! Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) began, like Freud, studying hypnosis, and moved to the study of the specific behaviours that were the basis of so-called trance. John Watson (1878-1958), Albert Bandura (1925-) and B.F. Skinner (1904-1990)  are later developers of this approach, along with Clark Hull (the Hypnotist who trained Milton Erickson). The behaviour therapists consider the proper subject of psychotherapy to be the study of the person’s specific behaviours, what stimulates them (anchoring), and what reinforces them. The therapist designs processes to stimulate and reinforce the desired outcome behaviours. Most behaviourists would now consider that the cognitions (thinking) the person does are also behaviours worth changing in this way. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is probably the most fully researched model of therapy. Cognitive behaviouralists (writing since the 1960s) include Albert Ellis Rational Emotive therapy, and Aaron Beck Cognitive therapy.  Many NLP techniques are essentially forms of Cognitive Behaviouralism (eg strategies, submodality work) and anchoring is a form of classical conditioning, as developed by Ivan Pavlov.

Group and Family Therapy: Early on in the history of Psychotherapy, Jacob Moreno (1889-1974) Psychodrama, Action Methods, began working with groups rather than individuals. This approach took a long time to gain acceptance. It did so not only as a result of the attention of groupworkers such as Wilfred Bion (a psychoanalyst working at the Tavistock centre in the 1950s/1960s) but also as a result of the use of action methods by the developers of Family therapy such as Virginia Satir (1916-1988), from whom the metamodel was developed. Other developers of Family Therapy working in the 1950s included John Bell, Milton Erickson (1902-1980), Carl Whitaker, Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) and Nathan Ackerman.Bateson’s work identifying strategies such as reframing gave much of the philosophical basis, not only to family therapy, but also to the solution focused therapies which evolved out of it (including NLP). One of the key characteristics of both Psychodrama and family therapy is the encouragement given to the “protagonists” to enact their situation rather than just talk about it. Another key element is the focus on the roles people play in interaction with each other, the dynamics of these interactions (rather than of some hidden internal forces) and the structures which result from these processes.

Bodywork: Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) Orgone therapy broke with Freud, as did the group therapists, partially because of a dissatisfaction with “the talking cure” as Psychoanalysis was called. His students Alexander Lowen Bioenergetics, and John Pierrakos CORE Energetics are central in the bodywork therapies. Bodywork is based on the belief that emotional problems are stored in the body and in the obstruction of body energy, and it is there that they must be released. The energy called animal magnetism by Mesmer is recognised by the bodyworkers as “orgone”, or “bioenergy” .  Other bodyworkers such as Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-1984) Awareness Through Movement,  have independently developed this model partially based on the study of ancient eastern systems of energy/body work.

Existential-Humanist Therapy:By the 1940s many therapists began to feel that the Behaviourist and Psychodynamic descriptions (which were then most popular) were inadequate responses to the human situation. They looked for answers to the philosophical movement of Existentialism, which said that the real issue is not “what” (what parts are present inside a person etc) but “how” (how does the person as a whole experience their life). This approach was combined with the valuing of human beings per se known as humanism. The existential humanists see therapy as a person to person “I-thou” experience rather than a technical battle with resistance and transference. The earliest psychoanalyst to promote this position was Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966). He was followed by a student of Reich and Moreno, Fritz Perls (1893-1970) Gestalt therapy, by Carl Rogers (1902-1987) Client Centered Therapy, Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), Rollo May, and Victor Frankl. These were the therapists who inspired the encounter movement of the 1960s.

Counselling: Much of modern Counselling evolved out of Client Centred therapy with students of Rogers who believed that while reflectively responding to the person’s situation was the crucial first step, it needed to be followed by sensitive confrontation, appropriate self disclosure and guiding the person through the problem solving process to find solutions to their concerns. Counselling is generally not so concerned with the childhood history of the concern, as with how it is for the person now in their life, and what they want to do about that. Robert Carkhuff, Allen Ivey and Gerard Egan (whose model combines Carkhuff and Ivey)  are key developers.

Pure Catharsis: Freud’s first breakthroughs (before he developed psychoanalysis) came from his and Breuer’s use of hypnosis to produce a catharsis in the person. Over the 1960s several therapies appeared which were in a sense a reaction to the airy-fairy “dissociated” style of counselling and humanism. Such “back to basics” movements were often initiated by a therapist stumbling upon the dramatic healing effect of Catharsis. Catharsis means the release of powerful feelings which results from re-experiencing a traumatic event. In a pure cathartic therapy, this is considered the key healing process, and “talking about” the trauma is merely a defence against feeling it. Interestingly, over time the developers of catharsis based therapies have a tendancy to introduce other elements into their work which assist the person to envision some future beyond the pain. In their beginnings, anyway, L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics/Scientology, Leonard Orr’s Rebirthing, Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy, and Harvey Jackins’ Re-evaluation Co-counselling were examples of this trend. Earlier therapies which have strong cathartic elements include Fritz Perls’ Gestalt therapy, Jacob Moreno’s Psychodrama, and Wilhelm Reich’s Reichian therapy. The NLP technique of parts integration was originally modelled off a cathartic process used by Moreno and Perls. However, in general, NLP has focused on alternatives to catharsis, considering that the process of catharsis is unneccesarily rough on the person’s system. Bryan Royds and I have developed a model for explaining the NLP-Catharsis difference. Our belief is that catharsis techniques can  associate people into the pain of a trauma fully enough so that their natural healing process of dissociation is triggered (this word is here used in it’s NLP sense, rather than the traditional meaning which refers to a compulsive splitting process we would think of as a parts problem).  Unfortunately, sometimes this doesn’t work; the person’s threshold for triggering the protective dissociation simply rises with the therapy, and the person is trapped into a “lifestyle” of continuous associating into pain. In that case, I recommend stopping the cathartic technique and directly reteaching the natural healing process, using the NLP trauma cure and the Time Line Therapy® process.

Solution Focused Therapies: The cluster of therapies I’m identifying here all share a strong interest in the finding of solutions for clients, rather than the “exploration of problems” in an indeterminate way. Milton Erickson’s work provided a focal point for the evolution of most of these approaches, which are also called “brief therapies”, and often rely on the skilful use of reframing and expectation of success. An interest in client “resources” rather than deficits, and in tasking the client to make therapeutic changes in their actual life are also important to these therapies.  Examples are Jay Haley’s Strategic Therapy, Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg’s Solution Focused Approach, the work of Ericksonian Therapists such as Ernest Rossi, Michael Yapko, and Jefferey Zeig, Richard Bandler and John Grinder’s Neuro Linguistic Programming, William Hudson O’Hanlon’s Brief Therapy, and Albert Ellis’ Rational Emotive Therapy (which we also scored under Cognitive Behavioural therapy.  NLP techniques used in Solution Focused “psychotherapy” are the collected results of modelling excellent therapists (initially, Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson). The structure of modelling makes NLP more precise, more “chunked down” to exact descriptions of what to do. Furthermore, NLP as a psychotherapy is only one application of the wider NLP which is used in Education, Health Care, Sports Achievement, Business etc. NLP is a whole new field. In many ways, as a therapy, it picks up on Robert Carkhuff’s idea of therapy as a form of teaching people to use skills.

EMDR/EFT/TFT/IEMT/Havening etc.: The cluster of therapies I’m identifying here all use physical movement (especially eye movements, self-tapping or stroking) as a way of getting the body into a state where reconsolidation of traumatic memories occurs.  Listed under catharsis above, Reichian Therapy is an early example, and Alexander Lowen describes rapid side-side eye movement in his 1960s texts of Bioenergetics. NLP trained psychologist Francine Shapiro created Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Danie Beaulieu, Andy Austin and Steve Andreas all produced NLP versions of this. Havening and EFT also use combinations of “affirmation”, and “distracting touch” such as self-soothing or self-tapping.

Does Psychotherapy Work? Having read about the incredible variety included under the term “Psychotherapy”, obviously the question is WHICH psychotherapy. In 1975 R.B. Sloane published one of the few studies ever to use a control group to check this out . 93% of Behaviour therapy clients and 77% of Psychodynamic therapy clients  (all worked with by highly experienced therapists) were found to have improved on a measurement of overall adjustment. Curiously, 77% of the control group (receiving NO therapy)  improved over the same period though! Good old placebo effect. This essentially supported the earlier survey by British Psychologist Hans Eysenck (“The Effects of Psychotherapy”, 1952) who reviewed all the available data on psychotherapy and control groups and concluded that it “fails to prove that psychotherapy, Freudian or otherwise, facilitates the recovery of neurotic patients.”

 Furthermore, the success of psychotherapy is not improved by taking more time. The mental Health Institute in Palo Alto, working with anyone who turns up, in ten sessions or less, has a 75% researched improvement rate. A number of psychoanalysts have published research showing that 6 months analysis does as much good as 10 years!

In fact, research suggests that for certain specific disorders (phobias, sexual difficulties and compulsions at least) the shorter behavioural therapies are more successful. After a comprehensive review of the research in 1978, S.L. Garfield and A.E. Bergin (in the “Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behaviour Change”) write that psychodynamic, humanist and behaviour therapies “have been found to be about equally effective with the broad spectrum of outpatients to whom they are typically applied….[but] it seems clear that with circumscribed disorders, such as certain phobias, some sexual dysfunctions, and compulsions, certain technical operations can reliably bring about success.”

The sad thing about this is that it suggests that the role of a successful therapist is to be a mere technician. What NLP has done is to put measurable behavioural change techniques such as anchoring back into a humanistic and transpersonal context. The NLP Practitioner uses techniques such as the phobia cure in the context of a relationship based on rapport, and respect for the person’s highest outcomes.  

So, is a long term professional training an advantage in creating the kind of therapeutic relationships therapists often talk about? A study in 1965 by Robert Carkhuff and C.B. Truax showed that laypersons with less than 100 hours of training communicated to clients approximately the same levels of empathy and warmth (i.e. “rapport” -considered by the researchers to be THE key ingredient in therapy) as a group of highly experienced professionals including Carl Rogers and Rollo May!  A  study by the same team in 1968 showed that untrained college students were rated by their clients as more accepting and at least as warm/genuine/empathic as trained counsellors .

On the other hand, research also shows that in a small percentage of cases, (eg 5-10% of family therapy cases, 17% of encounter group clients) participants report their situation worsening as a direct result of therapy. Can the clients claims be “trusted”? Well, they sure tend to be when the reports are good… despite all the evidence to the contrary.

The most significant reports of success from therapy are gained by asking clients “Was it good for you?” questions. They tend to SAY “yes”. When we check their actual life responses, though, a different story emerges. A classic example is a 1951 study of “An experiment in the Prevention of Delinquency” by E. Powers and H. Witmer.  Over 600 high risk 6-10 year old boys were assigned to two groups, one of which got therapy (either psychodynamic or Client centred) and one of which got none. Those in therapy got an average of 5 years therapy (fairly extensive!). Two thirds of the boys in therapy said they benefited, and their therapists agreed.  The boys claimed it kept them out of trouble and put them on the right track. There’s just one little problem. The boys receiving therapy  committed more serious crimes, had higher rates of alcoholism, mental illness and stress related diseases.

I believe that NLP makes sense of this. The boys in therapy had 5 years of someone focusing on what was WRONG with them! The results (a belief that therapy was “helping” them AND a deteriation in their life skills) are characteristic of people I’ve seen in NLP work who’ve been through years of therapy. If therapy means mainly exploring someone’s problems with them, then I’d say “DON’T DO IT!  DO NLP INSTEAD” (Research quoted in the book “The Shrinking of America” by Bernie Zilbergeld, Little Brown & Co 1983)

Therapy and the Abuse of Power: One final comment on psychotherapy as a field: Many of the people listed above as founders of psychotherapy were/are also profoundly abusive to women, children and ethnic minorities. Their actions defend the worst excesses of a white-Anglo-Saxon-male run society. (See “Against Therapy” by Jeffrey Masson, Collins 1988 for details)

We in NLP would do well to remember with caution how Fritz Perls proudly described his holding down a woman client in therapy and telling her he knew “Thousands of women like her in the States. Provoking and tantalising, irritating their husbands and never getting their spanking. You don’t have to be a Parisian Prostitute to need that so as to respect your man.” (from Gestalt Therapy Verbatim)

We could also remember with caution how Milton Erickson proudly taught “the desirability of physical restraint…. I had my patients put in straightjackets.”  There’s nothing unusual about this in the history of therapy. That’s the trouble. It’s very common!

As Fascism rose in Germany and the German psychiatrists recommended to Hitler that all psychiatric patients be exterminated (it was the psychiatrists who first developed the idea of gas chambers, to do this efficiently) Carl Jung was singing the praises of the Nazi ideology. He explains ” The Jew, who is something of a nomad, has never yet created a cultural form of his own, and as far as we know never will, since all his instincts and talents require a more or less civilised nation to act as host for their development.” After the war Jung was loud in his condemnation of the Nazis, and explained that he had only done what it took to enable psychotherapy to survive. Even this claim is a very instructive comment on his priorities.

I could go on (and Jeffrey Masson does), but you get the picture. It’s a risky business putting someone in the “Expert” role in terms of sanity and psychological health. And being an NLP Practitioner is no automatic safety guarantee. Richard Bandler is famous for his innovative ways of bringing catatonics out of a catatonic stupor. And some of them, using rapport, are great. But what about the time he hit a catatonic person full force on the foot with a hammer!? To me, that’s almost as irresponsibly destructive as ECT. (No presuppositions in my writing, are there.).

I want to remind you that there are many good therapists whose work is extremely valuable.  I consider people like Carl Rogers and Virginia Satir to have provided us with very congruent and loving models of being with those who come to us for help. Also, it’s important that people thinking of giving up (for example) a ten year involvement in therapy, do that carefully and by setting up more useful supports.

One thing I hope this article does is give you as the reader a healthy scepticism about the field of therapy. I believe that the presuppositions of NLP are an answer to these concerns I’ve raised. In short, I don’t think therapy is an ideal model for us to use with NLP. I agree with Richard Bandler when he says that his aim is to get his clients to think “I’ve got a problem. Will I go and see Richard about it? No, I’ll just fix it myself.” NLP is about teaching people skills to do it themselves. That’s the bottom line.

Bibliography

• Breggin, P. Toxic Psychiatry, Fontana, London, 1992
• Eysenck, H. “The outcome problem in psychotherapy”, in Dryden, W. and Feltham, C. ed. Psychotherapy and its Discontents, Open University, Buckingham, 1992p100-123
• Goleman, D. and Speeth, K. R. The Essential Psychotherapies, Mentor, New York, 1982
• Harper, R.A. The New Psychotherapies, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1975
• Masson, J. Against Therapy, Harper Collins, London, 1993
• Peele, S. Diseasing of America, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1989
• Zeig, J.K. and Gilligan, S.G. ed Brief Therapy, Brunner/Mazel, New York, 1990
• Zilbergeld, B. The Shrinking of America, Little Brown & Co, Boston, 1984

Hypnosis, Psychotherapy And NLP: A History