Structure_Of_Magic（神奇的结构）.doc

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Warning to the Reader
1
Chapter 1 - THE STRUCTURE OF CHOICE 5
Experience and Perception as an
Active Process ..........................• 8
Models and Therapy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 13
So What? 18
Chapter 2 - THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE. . . . . . . .. 21
The Meta-Model for Language 24
Some Universals of the Human
Linguistic Process. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
The Transformational Model 27
An Overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 35
Chapter 3 - THE STRUCTURE OF MAGIC. . . . . . . . . . . .. 39
The Meta-Model 40
Deep Structure and Beyond 45
Challenging Deep Structure 46
An Overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 53

Table of Contents I iv
Chapter 4 -INCANTATIONS FOR GROWTH
AND POTENTIAL. . . . . • . . . . . . . . . . • . . • • . . . . . . . .• 57
Deletion .. . . . . • . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 59
Distortion - Nominalizations . . • . . . • . • . • . . • . • . .• 74
Generalization .•.••..••........•.....•.••... 80
Well-Formed in Therapy ......•.....••.....••.• 107
Chapter 5 - INTO THE VORTEX ...•..•.............. 111
Transcript 1 .•.••.•.•••.•••...•••••.......•. 112 Transcript 2 ...••.•...••••.....•...••.•.••.. 134
Chapter 6 - ON BECOM I NG A
SORCERER'S APPRENTICE ........•...••....•.. 155
The Second Ingredient:
Reference Structures ......•...•.......... 157
Enactment: The Instant Replay
of Experience . . • . • . . . . . . • . . • • . . • . . . • . . . .. 164
Guided Fantasy - A Journey
into the Unknown ..........•.•....•••.•.. 166
Therapeutic Double Binds ...............•..... 169 Other Maps for the Same Territory ...•.... 172
Congruity .....••.••••..•..•..•..•.•...•.... 174 Family Therapy .••••••.•.••.•..••..•••. ' •.... 176
Conclusion - STRUCTURE OF THE FINAL
INCANTATION OF BOOK I .
179
TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR
THE STRUCTURE OF MAGIC /I •........•..•..... 181
Appendix A: A BRIEF OUTLINE OF
TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR .•.•...••.....• 183
Appendix B: SYNTACTIC ENVIRONMENTS FOR IDENTIFYING NATURAL LANGUAGE PRESUPPOSITIONS IN ENGLISH ...•.....•....... 211
Glossary •• . • • • • • • • . • • • • • . . • • • • . • . • • • . . • • • . • • • • • •. 215 Bibliography .•.••.............•.....•..•....•..•. 219

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank all of those who have been helpful in the completion of this book: Jim Anderson and Kristofer Bakke, without whom this book would have taken twice as long, and the makers of Foigers Coffee, without whose fine product we would not have made it through the long nights.

..................................... ::z ..:.;. .

FOR WORD
WOW! What could anyone say about having their work looked at by four fine eyes in the heads of two very capable human researchers? This book is the outcome of the efforts of two intriguing, smart young men who are interested in finding out how change takes place and in documenting the process. They seem to have come up with a description of the predictable elements that make change happen in a transaction between two people, Knowing what these elements are makes it possible to use them consciously and, thus, to have useful methods for inducing change.
I often say to people that I have a right to be a slow learner but educable. What this means to me as a therapist is that I have only one thought - to help the people who come to me in pain to make changes in their lives. How I use my body, my voice, my eyes, my hands, in addition to the words and the way I use words, is my only tool. Since my goal is to make change possible for everyone, every someone offers a new challenge.
Looking back, I see that, although I was aware that change was happening, I was unaware of the specific elements that went into the transaction which made change possible. For years, I wondered what it would be like to be on the other end of me, to view myself working, to view the process of change from the other side. The authors spent hours looking at video tapes and listening to audio material, and they found patterns emerging which they could document. I do something, I feel it, I see it, my gut responds to it - that is a subjective experience. When I do it with someone else, their eyes, ears, body sense these things. What Richard Bandler and John Grinder have done is to watch the process of change over a time and to distill from it the patterns of the how process. What they learned relates particularly, in a sophisticated way, to mathematics, physics, neurology and linguistics.
It would be hard for me to write this Foreword without my own feeling of excitement, amazement and thrill coming through. I have been a teacher of family therapy for a long time, as well as a clinician and a theoretician. This means that I have seen change taking place in many families, and I have been involved in training many family therapists. I have a theory about how I make change occur. The knowledge of the process is now considerably advanced by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who can talk in a way that can be concretized and measured about the ingredients of the what that goes into making the how possible.
Virginia M. Satir

INTRODUCTION
It is a strange pleasure to write an introduction for this book because John Grinder and Richard Bandler have done something similar to what my colleagues and I attempted fifteen years ago.
The task was easy to define: to create the beginnings of an appropriate theoretical base for the describing of human interaction.
The difficulty lay in the word "appropriate" and in the fact that what was to be described included not only the event se¬'quences of successful communication but also the patterns of misunderstanding and the pathogenic.
The behavioral sciences, and especially psychiatry, have always avoided theory, and it is easy to make a list of the various maneuvers whereby theory could be avoided: the historians (and some anthropologists) chose the impossible task of making not theory but more data out of what was known - a task for detectives and courts of law. The sociologists trimmed the com¬plex variations of known fact to such an ultimate simplicity that the clipped nuggets could be counted. Economists believed in transitive preference. Psychologists accepted all sorts of internal explanatory entities (ego, anxiety, aggression, instinct, conflict, etc.) in a way reminiscent of medieval psycho-theology.
Psychiatrists dabbled in all these methods of explanation; they searched for narratives of childhood to explain current behavior, making new data out of what was known. They attempted to create statistical samples of morbidity. They wallowed in internal and mythical entities, ids and archetypes. Above all, they borrowed the concepts of physics and mechan ics - energy, ten¬sion, and the like - to create a scientism. But there were a few beginnings from which to work: the "logical types" of Russell and Whitehead, the "Games Theory" of Von Neumann, the notions of comparable form (called "homol¬ogy" by biologists), the concepts of "levels" in linguistics, Von Domarus' analysis of "schizophrenic" syllogisms, the notion of discontinuity in genetics and the related notion of binary informa¬tion. Pattern and redundancy were beginning to be defined. And, above all, there was the idea of homeostasis and self-correction in cybernetics.
Out of these scattered pieces came a hierarchic classification of orders of message and (therefore) of orders of learning, the begin¬nings of a theory of "schizophrenia" and with it an attempt, very premature, to classify the ways in which people and animals code their messages (digital, analogic, iconic, kinesic, verbal, etc.).
Perhaps our greatest handicap at that time was the difficulty which the professionals seemed to experience when they tried to understand what we were doing. Some even tried to count "double binds" in recorded conversations. I treasure somewhere in my files a letter from a funding agency telling me that my work should be more clinical, more experimental, and, above all, more quantitative.
Grinder and Bandler have confronted the problems which we confronted then and this series is the result. They have tools which we did not have - or did not see how to use. They have succeeded in making linguistics into a base for theory and simultaneously into a tool for therapy. This gives them a double control over the psychiatric phenomena, and they have done something which, as I see it today, we were foolish to miss.
We already knew that most of the premises of individual psychology were useless, and we knew that we ought to classify modes of communicating. But it never occurred to us to ask about the effects of the modes upon interpersonal relations. In this first volume, Grinder and Bandler have succeeded in making explicit the syntax of how people avoid change and, therefore, how to assist them in changing. Here they focus on verbal communication. In the second volume, they develop a general model of communi¬cation and change involving the other modes of communication which human beings use to represent and communicate their experience. What happens when messages in digital mode are flung at an analog thinker? Or when visual presentations are offered to an auditory client?
We did not see that these various ways of coding - visual, auditory, etc. - are so far apart, so mutually differenteven in neurophysiological representation, that no material in one mode can ever be of the same logical type as any material in any other mode. This discovery seems obvious when the argument starts from linguistics, as in the first volume of the present series, instead of starting from culture contrast and psychosis, as we did.
But, indeed, much that was so difficult to say in 1955 is strikingly easier to say in 1975.
May it be heard!
Gregory Bateson Kresge College
University of California, Santa Cruz

Preface
Down through the ages the power and wonder of practitioners of magic have been recorded in song and story. The presence of wizards, witches, sorcerers, shamen, and gurus has always been intriguing and awe inspiring to the average person. These people of power, wrapped in a cloak of secrecy, presented a striking contra¬diction to the common ways of dealing with the world. The spells and incantations they wove were feared beyond belief and, at the same time, sought constantly for the help they could provide. Whenever these people of power publicly performed their won¬ders, they would both shatter the concepts of reality of that time and place and present themselves as having something that was beyond learning. In modern time, the mantle of the wizard is most often placed upon those dynamic practitioners of psychotherapy who exceed the skill of other therapists by leaps and bounds, and whose work is so amazing to watch that it moves us with powerful emotions, disbelief, and utter confusion. Just as with all wizards of the ages of the earth whose knowledge was treasured and passed down from sage to sage - losing and adding pieces but retaining a basic structure - so, too, does the magic of these therapeutic wizards also have structure.
The Prince and the Magician
Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there were no princesses or islands in his father's domains, and no sign of God, the prince believed his father.
But then, one day, the prince ran away from his palace and came to the next land. There, to his astonishment, from every coast he saw islands, and on these islands, strange and troubling creatures whom he dared not name. As he was searching for a boat, a man in full evening dress approached him along the shore.
"Are those real islands?" asked the young prince.
"Of course they are real islands," said the man in evening
dress.
"And those strange and troubling creatures?" "They are all genuine and authentic princesses." "Then God must also exist!" cried the prince.
"I am God," replied the man in evening dress, with a bow. The young prince returned home as quickly as he could. "So, you are back," said his father, the king.
"I have seen islands, I have seen princesses, I have seen God,"
said the prince reproachfully.
The king was unmoved.
"Neither real islands, nor real princesses, nor a real God exist." "I saw them!"
"Tell me how God was dressed." "God was in full evening dress."
"Were the sleeves of his coat rolled back?"
The prince remembered that they had been. The king smiled. "That is the uniform of a magician. You have been deceived." At this, the prince returned to the next land and went to the
same shore, where once again he came upon the man in full evening dress.
"My father, the king, has told me who you are," said the prince indignantly. "You deceived me last time, but not again. Now I know that those are not real islands and real princesses, because you are a magician."
The man on the shore smiled.
"It is you who are deceived, my boy. In your father's king¬dom, there are many islands and many princesses. But you are under your father's spell, so you cannot see them."
The prince pensively returned home. When he saw his father, he looked him in the eye.
"Father, is it true that you are not a real king, but only a
magician ?"
The king smiled and rolled back his sleeves. "Yes, my son, I'm only a magician."
"Then the man on the other shore was God." "The man on the other shore was another magician." "I must know the truth, the truth beyond magic." "There is no truth beyond magic," said the king.
The prince was full of sadness. He said, "I will kill myself." The king by magic caused death to appear. Death stood in the
door and beckoned to the prince. The prince shuddered. He remembered the beautiful but unreal islands and the unreal but beautiful princesses.
"Very well," he said, "I can bear it."
"Y ou see, my son," said the king, "you, too, now begin to be a magician."
Reprinted from The Magus, by John Fowles, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.; pp. 499-500.

Warning to the Reader
The central task of psychology, whether experimental or applied, is the understanding of human behavior. Human behavior is extremely complex. To say, however, that our behavior is complex is not to deny that it has structure. I n general, modern psychology has attempted to understand human behavior by breaking it down into relatively separate areas of study - for example, the areas of perception, of learning, of language be¬havior, of motor skills. As our understanding of each of these areas grows, we continue to uncover the structure of the human