Send message to Author

Short abstract:

This paper explores how indiviuals come to believe in NLP, an assemblage of mutiple psychology-related knowledge and techniques.And it demonstrates how this process influences their understanding of psychology, the mind-body relationships and themselves.

Long abstract:

Neuro Linguistic Programming（NLP）is a knowledge system developed in the United States in the 1970s, which attempts to understand the activities of the human mind and behavior patterns by combining various psychological, psychiatric and psychotherapeutic insights and techniques. Though it has long been claimed as “pseudo-science” by the scientists, it still flourished within the wave of the New Age Movement. It was introduced to Taiwan in the 90s. Today, it and its related technologies are practiced across fields including personal growth, business management, and psychotherapy in Taiwan, and also widely combined with various local knowledge systems.

With my field work and in-depth interview in two local NLP teaching institutions, this paper aims to understand how does the NLP make users "believe" in its explanatory power and effectiveness. The analysis focusses on three aspects. First, the boundary work from the NLP trainers through the performances and disclosures in their lectures. Second, the material configurations and group settings inside the classroom that allow students to gain embodied experiences through practice, and the meaningful evidence derived therefrom. Third, the changes in practitioners’ daily lives and their views on people, minds and behaviors after developing a new identity of “NLPer”.

This article will demonstrate how NLP, a fringe knowledge that has been excluded by academic psychology, plays an important role in the lay's understanding of psychology and their imagination of what it is to be a person.