A truly ground-breaking new book that provides a practical and generative "unified field theory" of experience and personal change. These simple understandings are illustrated with examples from the most effective therapists, collected over a lifetime.
If you ever find yourself out of choices — either in your own life, or in your work with others — you know how nice it would be to always have something to do next. You'll learn how the fundamental distinctions of scope, category, and logical level offer a way to describe and track all our experiences — from ordinary troubles and difficulties to positive mystic experiences of union or oneness. The same knowledge provides surprisingly endless possibilities for changing your experience when you want it to be different.
The book is illustrated with a multitude of rich examples gleaned from expert therapists — Milton Erickson, Virgina Satir, Frank Farrelly, Leslie Cameron-Bandler, Carl Whitaker, Salvador Minuchin, and many others. Some of these examples would be completely baffling without these understandings.
Those who appreciate a rigorous analysis will appreciate the clear discussion of logical levels. Although misunderstood by many previous thinkers, including Gregory Bateson, logical levels provide a simple way to determine where and how to intervene in problems. (Volume II continues this by examining a variety of more complex and troublesome communication patterns.)
While I had been thinking of this as an advanced book, the proofreader, with no NLP or therapeutic background at all, said that he wished he had read it twenty years ago, because it would have made his life so much easier.
Steve Andreas was an American psychotherapist and author specializing in Neuro-linguistic programming.Steve Andreas was the son of Barry Stevens, a writer and gestalt therapist. He founded Real People Press, a publisher of works on psychology and personal change in 1967, in order to publish a book by Carl Rogers and Barry Stevens entitled Person to Person.Andreas got a BA in chemistry from Caltech in 1957, then worked as a chemist at Shell. Afterwards he went to graduate school at Brandeis University under Abraham Maslow and received an MA degree in psychology in 1961. After working as an analytical chemist for the U.S. Bureau of Mines for a year, he got a junior college teaching credential, and taught psychology and social science at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill CA from 1962 to 1970.He was introduced to Gestalt therapy in 1967 by Fritz Perls, and edited his books, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim and In and Out the Garbage Pail. He wrote Awareness, a book of exercises based on Gestalt Therapy in 1971. In 1971 he retired from teaching to focus on running Real People Press and setting up a small experimental community based on the principles of his book.Steve Andreas, with his wife and partner Connirae, has been learning, teaching, and developing patterns in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) since 1977.
