Bandler supplied the intuition and modelling drive; Grinder the linguistic rigour. Their collaboration produced The Structure of Magic (1975) and the field's founding idea: excellence has structure that can be codified and learned. The full history — including the splits, the lawsuits and the lineage tree — is in our journal.
Who Invented NLP?
Richard Bandler and John Grinder, at UC Santa Cruz in the early-to-mid 1970s — a psychology student and a linguist who modelled the language patterns of exceptional therapists Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir, later Milton Erickson.
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ShriViral Manek, Institute of NLP India · reviewed 30 Sept 2026