Hi chaosadelt,

I'd be happy to give you a couple of examples.

Linguistically speaking, the farther we move away from sensory-based language (what we can see, hear, smell, taste and touch) the more abstract we move. A good example of this is found in the first sentence, "Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) is one of many New Age Large Group Awareness Training programs."

"New Age" probably means something a little different to everyone, and the author was trading on that fact, as well as on the slightly negative connotation of the phrase "new age" itself.

Here's another great one, "One common thread in NLP is the emphasis on teaching a variety of communication and persuasion skills, and using self-hypnosis to motivate and change oneself." Very little sensory-based language there but many nominalizations. A nominalization is a verb that has been turned into a noun. You'll find lots of nominalizations in hypnotic and persuasive language because they are extremely vague. "Freedom" is a fantastic nominalization as any politician knows...ask any 100 people what "freedom" means to them and you'll most likely get around 100 different answers.

The point to my original post was simply that the article is extremely opinionated and slanted, which I can accept when the author knows what he is talking about. Unfortunately I highly doubt this person has spent any time actually experiencing what NLP claims.

As a computer programmer who is just finishing the Practitioner Certification (with NLP Comprehensive in Colorado), I can say that in my own experience NLP is a pretty solid science. The techniques can be reduced to steps which, with a small amount of training, anyone can follow to consistantly produce results. Let's see traditional psychotherapy claim that !

At one point in the article the author picks on NLP's presuppositions: "When the space shuttle blew up within minutes of launch, killing everyone on board, was that "only feedback"? " However, what the author misses is the spirit which the presuppositions are intended.

We aren't interested in whether or not the presuppositions are "true" or "false" but rather are they useful? Sure, the space shuttle accident was a tragedy. Sure, that mission is considered a failure, but let me ask you this: Did we still continue to fly space shuttle missions? Hopefully we learned what went wrong with that mission and corrected it so no ever loses their life on another space shuttle mission....that is the nature of reframing a failure into feedback.

Just to balance things out, here is a link to the alt.psychology.nlp FAQ:
http://www.rain.org/~da5e/nlpfaq.html