Ian Glad you enjoyed Whispering! Paul Watzlawick's (actually, Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson's) Pragmatics of Human Communication is a "popularization" of Bateson's work (primarily the work presented in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (note the dedication). We found nothing in Pragmatics that wasn't represented in a deeper more thought-provoking form in Bateson directly. I intend this to be a description not a critique as according to Bateson, Watzlawick and his co-authors set out to ensure that the world recognized Bateson's contribution by putting it in a more accessible form. We preferred the original. Watzlawick's work on reframing is, to me at least, more interesting than his popularization of Bateson. In any case, Pragmatics exercised no influence on either Bandler or I in creating NLP; Bateson most assuredly did. John