The Structure of Magic, Vol. 1: A Book About Language and Therapy

Bandler and Grinder are absolutely the best minds in linguistics and theraphy and self-change. The meta-models and questions in this book can be used daily to break away limiting beliefs and limitations in thinking and possiblity. One secret is that the chapter called "Incantation for Growth and Potential" is the most powerful chapter in this book, as Bandler reveals just a few years ago.Memorise the meta-models, and the questions to break away the Distortion, Deletion and Generalization, and you will be glad you did. One of the most powerful question I learned from this book is, "What IF I could?" whenever I think of a goal, or whenever someone said something is 'impossible' to achieve. READ THIS BOOK!

Fascinating book about strucutre of language, how people represent their external world within their mind, how their speech reflects their representation of the world, and how therapists can use the speech patterns to help people improve their lives.It's a neurolinguistic programming book, based on the work of some very gifted psychotherapists and hypnotists.

The Structure of Magic, along with Noam Chomsky's work on Language (Knowledge of Language, Language and Thought, Language and Mind) are the bedrock documents of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), a rhetorical/psychological/spiritual discipline much misunderstood and much mis-appropriated by various well-meaning folks and charlatans alike, the most famous of whom is Anthony Robbins.If you're serious about understanding where NLP comes from, begin with this book and with Chomsky. Since Structure of Magic relies on an understanding of transformational grammar, it may be necessary to read Chomsky (and a good textbook on transgrammar) first.Additionally, you may find it valuable to have a general psycholinguistics text handy, and to have at least a passing understanding of psychoanalytic/psychological therapeutic technique (since Structure of Magic looks at the practices of particularly highly-performant psychologists/analysts).Once you're mastered this material, you'll discover that most of the other texts on NLP either miss key aspects of the discipline, or appropriate NLP's vocabulary and models for peculiar and sometimes suspect ends.A hard read, in the final analysis, but well worth it.

THE first NLP book that specifically introduces the Meta-Model. A fairly easy book to read on some basic questioning techniques to get to someone's deep structure (someone's true linguistic representation of the world). Fairly easy to read except the appendix on transformal grammar. Use these patterns carefully for they can be rather direct. A must for the beginning NLP student.

This is the first "NLP" book, and is a look at the language used by some great psychotherapists (Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls). The book is structured around various linguistic structures and its theoretical basis comes from Noam Chomsky's Transformational Grammar. Because of this the book can be somewhat difficult to read -- as each linguistic structure is presented, the authors give examples of its use and drills for practice in recognizing them. The book is a must read for anyone who practices psychotherapy, and is useful for anyone involved in communicating with other people (uh, yes, that does mean everyone). It's a great tool for improving the way one thinks, by giving a person the ability to recognize "deficient" uses of everyday language, and when to search for "missing" information in what people say.