Some readers will already be aware of the attacks made on NLP in certain quarters, especially the "co-ordinated" assault on the relevant Wikipedia page (which I'll come back to at the end of this item).
In this FAQ I want to address a brief but pungent assault which I found in a school textbook which first appeared in 2006.  It is remarkable, in my opinion, in that it comes from a well-known publisher of books on psychology. . Yet as we will see, it amounts to nothing more than a very distasteful and, in my opinion, a totally unprofessional, example of malicious rumour mongering.

It does, however, have value as an illustration of what criticisms of NLP, even when coming from reputable sources, actually amount to.

The following material appears in a book called OCR Psychology: AS Core Studies, authored by Philip Banyard and Cara Flanagan, and published by Psychology Press.  It is the last paragraph we will be studying in detail, but it is necessary to quote the whole item to establish the context in which the critical comments are made.

What is truly remarkable about that final paragraph is that the key sentence contains only one unambiguously correct statement.  Yet if the authors had adequately researched NLP before writing this nonsense they would have known that their claims were untrue.  Thus:

1. Several NLP techniques involve a process known as "anchoring", which is closely related to classical conditioning (a topic covered in Banyard and Flanagan's textbook).  If NLP has "absolutely nothing to do with biology" then neither does Pavlov's work.  Remembering that Pavlov was primarily a physiologist rather than a psychologist,of course.
    
2. One of the very first models devised by the co-creators of NLP is known as the "meta model."  This is based on Transformational Grammar, devised by American linguist Noam Chomsky.  Dr John Grinder, one of the two co-creators of NLP was, when work on development NLP began, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) and had co-authored a college-level textbook on Transformational Grammar.
    
3. NLP has "absolutely nothing to do with computers (programming)".
   Correct, after a fashion.  In fact this statement is totally misleading - because no one ever claimed that it had.
   The word "programming," in this context, is an analogy referring to the way that human beings often repeat patterns of inappropriate thoughts and/or behaviour with the same inflexibility that a computer executes the instructions in its software, regardless of whether those instructions still (or ever did) make sense. (This does not infer that humans are computers of some kind, only that they sometimes act as if they were.)
    
   (As a point of interest, the name "neuro-linguistic programming" was devised by the originator and co-developer of NLP, Richard Bandler, who was studying maths and computing at the UCSC at the time he created the name.)
    
4. Contrary to the allegation that "NLP claims to be scientific", in the first place NLP is a specific form of modeling and therefore doesn't claim anything.  And secondly the co-developers of NLP have never claimed that it was scientific.  On the contrary, they have overtly rejected any such claim.
    
5. Yes, NLP does sell a lot of books.  But what does this have to do with the validity of NLP and/or the various NLP-associated techniques and applications?
   (In fact it seems to have a very definite purpose, as we'll see in a moment.)

1. Let's start with the seemingly innocent phrase, "some suggest ..."
   In NLP this would be referred to as an example of a "lack of referential index".  That is to say, we are not told who these "some" are.  Nor are we told what qualifications they have to make these claims, or whether they even have any genuine knowledge of NLP.  And since we don't know who "some" are, we readers cannot collect the rest of the information for ourselves, and therefore we actually have absolutely no way of evaluating the claims.
    
   Having said that, since the claims appear in a textbook written by two people who are supposedly experts on psychology (why else are they being paid for writing textbooks?), anyone who does not already know enough about NLP to recognise that this is end-to-end rubbish might reasonably assume that the claims are true (why else would the authors be telling us about them?)
    
2. The phrase "some suggest" marks the commencement of a technique referred to in NLP, for fairly obvious reasons, as "quoting".  The authors appear to be attempting to hand off responsibility for their own views by attributing them to someone else (why else quote what the anonymous "some" have said at all?).  In NLP this technique is used benignly to minimise the resistance that might arise if someone were given a direct command.  Here it seems it is being used with purely negative intent.
    
3. The construction of the whole sentence
   

   "For example, some suggest ... (programming), however NLP claims to be scientific and sells a lot of books."

   is quite a skilful use of what is know in NLP as "scope ambiguity".  That is to say, since there are no "quote marks" in the paragraph it isn't clear whether the phrase "some suggest" refers only to the first half of the sentence - up to and including the word "(programming)" - or to the whole sentence.  Did the mysterious "some" state that "NLP claims to be scientific"?  Or is this particular piece of misinformation all the authors' own work?
    
   Again, in NLP this is a technique which is only used legitimately for benign purposes.  Here it appears to be another ploy by which the authors present wholly incorrect and derogatory allegations whilst trying to hand off any responsibility for their actions.  Is their standard of professionalism such that they do not believe they have any responsibility to check the material they choose to "quote"?
    
4. And still we haven't finished with this sentence.  Remember I questioned what the phrase "and sells a lot of books" had to do with anything?  Well note that whole section of the sentence:
   

   "... however NLP claims to be scientific and sells a lot of books."

   Here we have an example of an untruth linked to a truth to create "validation by association," another originally benign technique, in this case inherited from the work of Milton Erickson.
   The statement "NLP claims to be scientific" is untrue, but "NLP ... sells a lot of books" is true.  Thus, it appears to me, there is an attempt to slip through the untrue claim by placing the true statement not only right next door to it, but also AFTER it, thus making it less likely that we will consciously notice or remember the untruth.
    
5. The last sentence of the paragraph is not NLP.  It is, however, as questionable as anything else written here.
    
   It starts with the claim that the authors are leaving it to the reader to evaluate the claims they have cited.  Yet they have (a) not acknowledged that the first four claims are unsubstantiated, nor (b) given us any factual information about NLP except that it sells a lot of books!  How, then, can we genuinely decide for ourselves?
    
   In reality, of course, it seems fairly obvious that the authors have no desire to present a fair or accurate picture of NLP.  On the contrary, all I can see here is the intention to create a particular impression of NLP - that it is the work of fakers and charlatans. Why else finish with that highly emotive phrase?

And there is possibly a final twist.
When I first wrote this FAQ I suggested that these authors may have been fooled by some of the nonsense which has appeared on the Wikipedia page for NLP.

Since then, I have discovered an even more likely culprit - an e-mail posted to the author of a website called The Skeptic's Dictionary.  My hunch is based on the following similarity:

Extract from reader's comments:

"I can assert that NLP has nothing to do with neuroanatomy, nothing to do with linguistics, and nothing to do with programming."
(From e-mail from Malcolm Mclean, 15 December, 1999 at http://www.skepdic.com/comments/neurocom.html)

Extract from text book:

"... some suggest that Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) has absolutely nothing to do with theories of biology (neuro), language (linguistics) or computers (programming)."
(AS CORE Studies PSYCHOLOGY OCR, P Banyard and C. Flanagan (2006).  Psychology Press, Hove. page 213)

The reader's comment is as ill-informed as the article itself (see FAQ #27 for detailed analysis).  How ironical, if this was indeed the basis for Banyard and Flanagan's comments that they should have so unquestioningly trusted in nothing more than a couple of pieces of arrant misinformation.