Revisiting the Book That Inspired Pickup Artists, Cult Leaders–and Was Linked to a Murder
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Image: Jim Cooke
The psychedelic cover of Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming isn’t exactly typical of my bookshelf: It features an oversize frog, a potion bottle, a gilded torch, and an enchantress wearing flowing, celestial fabrics. On the back, there is a dragon. The book, written by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in 1979, details their fringe, pseudoscientific theory of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), a framework for purportedly influencing behavior using everything from touch to tone to hand movements. They write about hypnosis, the secret codes of human eye movements, and curing phobias and physical ailment in just minutes. They reject science and statistics, put “truth” in scare-quotes, and, above all, emphasize the ability to get your way using their tools. “It will get you almost everything,” Bandler and Grinder write, presenting themselves as spell-casters, magicians of humanity. It is the urtext of pickup artistry.
The pickup artist, or PUA, scene exploded in the mid-2000s with a pack of flashily dressed men with nicknames like J-Dog and Matador. They charged exorbitant amounts for “seduction” workshops, rated women on a one-to-10 scale, and talked about blasting through their partners’ “last minute resistance” to sex. Mystery, a “seduction” guru with a signature fluffy top hat and a method for subtly insulting (or “negging”) women into bed, had a VH1 reality-TV show. The journalist Neil Strauss hit the New York Times bestseller list with The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, which detailed his “penetrating” investigation of PUA “secrets.” I recently found myself revisiting Strauss’s book and there I read about how Frogs into Princes was inspirational to Ross Jeffries, the so-called “godfather” of pickup, and how Strauss himself read the book as a foundational text in his PUA journey. A few days later, this book with a trippy drawing of an amphibian was sitting on my doorstep.
The Game credits the book with changing “godfather” Jeffries from an “angry,” “girlfriendless” 20-something into a supposedly master seducer and author of How to Get the Women You Desire into Bed. As Strauss wrote in a truly jaw-dropping pair of sentences: “One of [Jeffries’] heroes had always been the Green Lantern, who was endowed with a magic ring able to bring the desires of his will and imagination to life.” He continued: “After using NLP to end a long streak of involuntary chastity by seducing a woman who’d applied for a job in the law office where he worked, Ross Jeffries believed he had found that ring. […] The power and control that had eluded him his whole life was finally his.”
Those three lines are about as succinct a representation of pickup artistry as I could ever imagine, but they also specifically tap into the themes of Frogs into Princes, a book that, despite its name and influence, does not explicitly deal with “seduction.” It does, however, speak of “magic” and the ability to control other human beings. The entire text is a transcript of a multi-day NLP workshop for therapists, hosted by Bandler and Grinder.
The pair first met years earlier at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as a psychology student and linguistics professor respectively. Together, they developed NLP as a therapeutic treatment, one that has since been roundly criticized for its lack of evidence, and research has cast dramatic doubt on its biggest claims. As one researcher bluntly put it in 2015, “there is still no credible theoretical basis for NLP.” Yet NLP’s influence expanded in the decades after its founding, and well beyond its original therapeutic intent. Since its publication, the book has been linked not only to pickup artistry and its associated ills, but also a murder, a sex cult, and a self-help guru accused of sexual harassment. Retrospectively reading Frogs into Princes, there is little about those connections that surprise.
The aim of the original workshop that became Frogs into Princes was to teach therapists how to apply Bandler and Grinder’s theories to the treatment of everything from alcoholism to a fear of heights. This pseudo-clinical focus might seem a far cry from bringing a woman home from a bar, except that their fundamental premise of systematically manipulating people into their desired reaction perfectly tracks to pickup artistry: try and try again, until you get your way. The players are different, therapist and patient versus PUA and target, but the basic ethos is the same.
Early on in the transcribed workshop, the question of ethics is brought up by Bandler and Grinder. (It’s often unclear which of them is talking, so I’ll quote them jointly.) They are speaking with the audience about observing therapists in action and then asking them about the motivation behind each of their in-session maneuvers, whether shifting their tone or reaching out to touch a patient. Therapists, they say, have no idea what outcome they are aiming for and, in fact, are horrified at the idea of having one in mind. “They claimed that if they did specific things to get specific outcomes that would be something bad, calling manipulating,” they told the audience. The pair retort: “We call ourselves modelers.” Specifically, they mean modelers of human behavior.
The aim of that modeling is to manipulate human behavior. The first-hand clinical examples Bandler and Grinder give are spectacularly awful: for example, visiting a psychiatric institution and stomping on a catatonic woman’s foot in order to get a reaction. They speak, admiringly, of another therapist “willing to do anything to get contact and rapport,” who began gradually pulling hairs out of a catatonic woman’s leg, going higher and higher with each, until she purportedly yelled, “Get your hands off me!” They recall witnessing a therapist implanting false, disturbing childhood memories into the mind of a suicidal patient to cure her. They speak of, essentially, hypnotizing a man experiencing unwanted attraction to men, purportedly leading him from gay to straight (this kind of “conversion” or “reparative” therapy has been shown to be traumatic and abusive, not to mention ineffective).