Structure Of Magic V1 : A Book About Language And Therapy

This book is one of the foundation stones of NLP. First published in 1975, it was designed to give an explicit set of tools to help psychotherapists be more effective. The book is largely concerned with language systems and was the definitive work on the Meta-model until The Secrets Of Magic came along.

As reviewed by Judith Lowe:''The Tao that can be told is not the Eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.''I have come, over the years, to regard the Meta-Model as a form of Zen the ''Way of the Meta-Model.'' This extraordinary book is how the field of NLP began, from the modelling of Perls and Satir (the book is dedicated to Satir who writes of her own ''excitement, amazement and thrill'') and the use of Transformational Grammar to create a tool from linguistics, praised by Bateson and described by Bandler and Grinder simply as a ''meta-model for therapy''. Later, John Grinder has described it as ''the first syntactically based language model for an express purpose ever created - in which clients are literally forced to expand and/or revise the mental maps that contain the traps, flaws and limitations that prevent them from shifting to more effective and congruent behaviour.''Brilliant and paradigm-shifting, it''s astonishing that the Meta-Model isn''t more widely known outside of NLP. This book has transcripts of conversational change and - be warned - syntax trees which I admit I have not studied deeply! The Meta-Model re-connects you to sensory experience and takes you back into the flow of life... ''free from desire, you realise the mystery