Table Of ContentTHE
STRUCTURE '
OF MAGIC
II
By JOHN
GRINDER
and
RICHARD BANDLER
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Science and Behavior Books, Inc.
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© Copyright 1976 by Science and Behavior Books, Inc. Printed in the United
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Typography by Penguin « Santa Clara, California
/ft).
To
Leslie Cameron
one of the world's most creative
family therapists
and to
Steve Gilligan
one of the world's most effective
hypnotists
with our
deepest respect
30 i 5 3 a
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Table Of Contents
PARTI
Representational Systems — Other Maps For The
Same Territory ............................................,............ 1
PART II
Incongruity ...................................................................... 27
PART III
Fuzzy Functions .............................................................97
PART IV
Family Therapy — The Delicate Flower .........................123
PARTV
Formal Notation .............................................................163
Epilogue ................................................................................195
Bibliography .........................................................................197
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PARTI
Representational Systems
Other Maps For The
Same Territory
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Representational Systems / 3
INTRODUCTION
In Volume One of The Structure of Magic we began the
process of making the magical skills of potent psychotherapists
available to other practitioners in a learnable and explicit form. We
presented to you the intuitions these psychotherapeutic wizards
have about language in a step-by-step form so that you could train
yourself to use your own intuitions, thereby increasing your skill.
In this second volume, we intend to present more of the intuitions
these wizards have about language, and to extend our work to
include the intuitions and systematic behavior of these wizards
relative to other ways a human being can both represent and
communicate his world. While you read this volume, we would
like you to keep in mind several aspects of The Structure of Magic I.
Human beings live in a "real world." We do not, however,
operate directly or immediately upon that world, but, rather, we
operate within that world using a map or a series of maps of that
world to guide our behavior within it. These maps, or representa-
tional systems, necessarily differ from the territory that they
model by the three universal processes of human modeling:
Generalization, Deletion, and Distortion. When people come to us
in therapy expressing pain and dissatisfaction, the limitations
which they experience are, typically, in their representation of the
world and not in the world itself.
The most thoroughly studied and best understood of the
representational systems of human modeling maps is that of
human language. The most explicit and complete model of natural
language is transformational grammar. Transformational grammar
is, therefore, a Meta-model — a representation of the structure of
human language — itself a representation of the world of
experience.
Human language systems are, themselves, derived representa-
tions of a more complete model — the sum total of the experience
the particular human being has ha d in his life. Transformational
linguists have developed a number of concepts and mechanisms to
describe how the way that people speak — their Surface Structures
— is actually derived from their full linguistic representation — the
Deep Structures. The transformational Meta-models describe these
concepts and mechanisms explicitly — they are specific cases of
the general modeling processes of Generalization, Distortion and
Deletion.
In adapting the concepts and m echanisms of the transforma-
tional model of the human represent ational system of language for
the purposes of therapy, we develo ped a formal Meta-model for
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AI PART.
therapy. This formal Meta-model is:
(a) Explicit — that is, it describes the process of therapy in a
step-by-step manner, guaranteeing that the Meta-model is
learnable; this results in an explicit strategy for therapy.
(b) Independent of content — dealing with the form of the
process and, therefore, having universal applicability.
The Meta-model relies only upon the intuitions which every native
speaker has of his language. The overall implication of the Meta-
model for therapy is the assumption of well-formed in therapy.
Well-formed in therapy is a set of conditions which the Surface
Structures the client uses in therapy must meet in order to be
acceptable. Using this appropriate grammar for therapy, we, as
therapists, can assist our clients in expanding the portions of their
representations which impoverish and limit them. This results in
enriching their lives in such a way that they experience more
options in their behavior, more opportunities to experience the
joys and richness that life has to offer. When integrated with the
people-helper skills which you, as a therapist, already have avail-
able to you, this process of growth and change is profoundly
accelerated. This language of growth, then, is truly an essential part
of The Structure of Magic.
THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY
One of the important conclusions we established in Magic I is
that the map necessarily differs from the territory it is repre-
senting, and that each map will differ from every other map in
some way. The map or model that we have been referring to so far
is a simplification of a more complex process. In fact, the map we
have been referring to is actually a series of maps which result
when we model our experiences by using what we call representa-
tional systems.
INPUT CHANNELS
There are three major input channels by which we, as human
beings, receive information about the world around us — vision,
audition, and kinesthetics (body sensations). (The remaining two
