Hi GSM and everybody, You have posted (from another forum) "While Richard and John modelled and "codified" Milton's patterns ... Bateson called the work "shoddy" and Milton was being polite." in 1975, first edition of Patterns of the hypnotic techniques of Milton Erickson , Intel had the best microprocessor (about  8bit - 86 Mhz or sometheing close) but do not stop working nor does Grinder and Bandler (microprocessor are now 64 bits - > 3Ghz). Every scientific discipline makes progress. Moreover, Bateson has said something like " Shoddy Epistemology" (look p. 117 of WITW note 33)  which makes a big difference from shoddy work. Epistemology is not at the same level as  patterns, techniques. And this is a very complex question. My interpretation relies on that unconscious and conscious logic are different. The verbal hypnotic patterns of Milton (from which JG and RB derived the Milton model of patterns) are the results of too many transformations (one is a change in logic) from the state of Erickson (at the unconscious level) to his words so that it is possible to grasp the WHY Erickson at this moment choose this words and others non verbal communication. Unconscious knowledge incorporate all our learnings, for Milton about 65 years of multi level communication a that time. Shoddy Epistemology , in no way, means that the patterns presented by JG and RB are not effective,  And that most of all can't learn a lot from them and much faster than without them. Erickson said in the preface "I would also like an analysis of HOW and WHY carefully structured communications can elicit such extensive and effective patient responses, often not actually requested." I don't think, it was not the aim of JG and RB when they made the Milton model and I don't know if it is even possible to answer that question but Erickson looks toward new progress. JG and RB have not finished all possible modeling about the knowledge of Erickson, well thanks to them that lets new things to discover for others. You might know that for a much less complex problem like "Heat transfer coefficient" thousand of PhD thesis has been published and there is still new progress every years. By the way there is no perfect, ideal, complete model. What if a perfect Perl model has been made. I mean a "black box" that responds exactly as Perl. Bander, Pucelik, Grinder will not have better results than him. Well but It would been a perfect model of Perl. Let Take another example :  the first rank tennis players of the last 30 years, they all have idiosyncrasies. Teaching Mc Enroe to play, as J. Connors would not have help him really much. Even if JG and RB had managed to build a "complete", "perfect" model of  Erickson, as Erickson said himself (to Gilligan? after deep trance identification ) there is no place for two Ericksons in the world. We are all different, and it relies partly on our history stored in our inconcious knowlegde. Don't look for a perfect model, the map is not the territory and the territory is not the territory. All the best, JPG