Richard was in an experimental stage of his career which I feel is a life long stage for him. He was very interested in a school of thought called Gestalt psychology which focuses on bringing immediate present experience into greater clarity and increasing awareness. Richard spent many hours reviewing transcripts about Gestalt Therapy, starring a person named Fritz Perls, M.D.Ph.D, the founder of Gestalt Therapy.
He was also interested in other contemporary psychotherapies, and family therapy, a way of bringing about change in a family by working with the immediate and sometimes extended family system and developing expertise in Rolfing, a method of deep massage used to realign the connective tissue of the body.
During his student years, Richard made some of his income working at a publishing company for a person named Robert who is a doctor, lawyer and the owner of a publishing company. Bob asked Richard to edit some of Fritz Perls' transcripts and the results of that editing was Richard's first book called The Gestalt Approach and Eye Witness To Therapy.
Richard was quite proud of his first book. In fact he used to keep it with him at all times just to show other people. He would often have it on him personally, and kept it with him in his car so that he could show hitch hikers whilst he was driving around in his 1966 yellow convertible Chevy II SS, that he had authored a book.
Chapter Three. Gestalt Class
Being disillusioned with the activities and courses and the curriculum of the university, Richard decided to set out into creating his own curriculum. One of the advantages of being a fourth year student at the University of California in Santa Cruz was that you could develop and present your own seminar and the students who attended would receive the same credits as if they were taking a course from a full professor. Richard decided to teach a student directed seminar on Gestalt Therapy.
In the spring of 1972, Richard held his first class at Kresge College at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Kresge College was the home of the "soft sciences". It was the college that the psychology students wanted to go to because it featured a lot of "encounter group activities".
One such activity it was said to have featured was nude dinners where everyone would show up and take off their clothes and then sit down for dinner. This was known as a "growth experience" and was very popular among the first year students.
Richard's class was strictly a clothes on affair. Nevertheless Richard still had a flair for the bizarre. He had a way of unveiling peoples' psyche and getting them to bare their souls in a classroom setting. Richard's seminar was a student directed seminar which meant that he could teach a course if he was supervised by a faculty member of the college. John Grinder had agreed to be Richard's supervisor for the course and very soon became keenly interested in Richard's approach to changing human behaviour.
At that time, John Grinder was in the process of working thru the stages of becoming a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He had received his Ph.D. from a college in San Francisco, where he studied the theories of the American linguist Noam Chomsky, and studied extensively the syntax of language. John at this time had cowritten at least one book called On Deletion.
John came from a large Catholic family in contrast to Richard being an only child from a Jewish background. John was quite experienced already in using behavioural flexibility and modelling languages. He served in the military where he was classified as an interpreter, spoke several languages and participated in covert activities under the sponsorship of the United States Army. He was also accustomed to changing of identity.
On one specific operation he spent some time in Africa where he lived with a village of Africans and through specific modelling process acquired the language of Swahili. He went thru the beginnings of learning the behaviors of languages thru the process of modelling as opposed to rote learning.
With John's brilliant skills in languages and already acquired skills of modelling, as well as his experiences acquiring his Ph.D. in linguistics, he bought into his association with Richard many different skills and understanding of modelling and its application to languages that Richard had yet to acquire.
John was very active in progressive teaching techniques at the University. He even went as far as to get the university to hire Richard to copresent some of his courses. Back then, John's preferrence was for t-shirts and denims rather than a tweed coat and bow tie. He was always clean shaven and wore his curly hair longish. With his two children living with their mother, the recently separated John lived alone in Scotts Valley deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
In the spring of 1972, John became Richard's supervisor for the course to be held at Kresge College. John was a novice at that time in the applications of counseling and psychotherapy, so the idea of supervisor was a bit of a misnomer and a question of "who supervised who".
John with his brilliant modelling skills from linguistics in conjunction with Richard who had the experience in behavioural modelling skills and his knowledge in the new contemporary systems of psychotherapy, formed a relationship which later on proved to be exceptional and beneficial to both. A relationship that set the foundations of a methodology that was the driver for an evolution of human communication.
Richard began the performance of his duty as a seminar instructor at Kresge College. His first class was Gestalt Awareness, a typical class in this new system called Gestalt Therapy. The classroom consisted of a carpeted floor with several pillows around the outside walls. Two pillows were strategically placed in the middle of the room. The students would come in and sit down in somewhat of a circle. Richard would arrive, take off his knife, put it beside him, put out his props, including cigarettes and a box of kleenex tissues, and ask, "Who would like to work first?" At that point it would be a contest between the students of who could convince who, of the importance of fixing their problems first.
Now the term working in this sense meant that one individual would go into the centre of the room and sit on a pillow and would then start a technique called "Shuttling Psychodrama and Confusion". Richard Bandler would play the Gestalt Therapist, cigarettes and kleenex tissues at the ready and non directively direct a student to become aware internally and externally of whatever they were seeing, hearing or feeling at that moment in time.
The technique would then usually evolve into what was called an open chair technique where the person in the middle of the room would imagine a person in an open chair and begin a conversation with this imaginary person about some unfinished business or conflict that the student would want to work on.