The incredible genius of Freud has inspired many developments.  Its worth noting the great deal amount of Freud's work that is embedded in NLP. Here are list of concepts and ideas that start with Freud: 1.  Dynamic Unconscious - it is continuously at work motivating our behavior.  Freud used post-hypnotic suggestion to show the existence of the unconscious - where the person does not know why he is carrying out the suggestion made to him under hypnosis.  The individual makes all kinds of spurious reasons to explain his/her conduct, and the unconscious incluence makes the individual distort his/her reality - Freud identified how the mind distorts and generates a version of reality. The unconscious may include organised mental products or derivatives of repressed drives (i.e. infantile representations of parents). 2.  Processes - Freud said the unconscious is not a word, but a process and highlights the difficulty of putting unconscious processes into words. 3.  Unconscious processses in Freud lingo, are akin to FA associations ...anchoring, phobic responses, complex equivalences, associative experiences (pre-lingual) - that can lead to meta-model violations in language. 4.  Truth redefined - Freud questioned the literal meaning of things - and continually reassessed any conclusive remarks. 5.  Freud highlights the problems of cause-effect thinking with complex, alive systems - because we can never know exactly the intial condition of the system, so much happens in a person's life that will push development one way or another, and many interactions between the parts of the system we are studying. 6.  Freud made the mind/body connection - the mind systhesizes sense data, and the body sensations are connected to emotional states (fear, frustration, satisfaction, anger) and directed towords important people (objects) in the outside world. 7.  Freud talked about incongruency - or what Anna Freud termed as 'splitting'. 8.  Freud talked about mental ecology, what was discussed as all mental processes as 'defensive' in the sense that the mental apparatus attempts to maintain its own equilibrium. 9.  Freud saw his work as the creation of models (i.e. f2 transforms) of unconscious processes. 10.  Ego is connected to organisation of the body and representations of the outside world.  Akin to FA and the pleasure principle.  The reality principle wich is used to replace the pleasure principle, is used to delay gratification (perhaps something like a f2 feed-forward process). 11.  The power of identity and the process of identification (i.e. second position modeling) on behavior - 'hysterical identification' where one person gets the symptom and another catches it through 'identification' - common phenomenon in groups.  Freud regarded identification as the main process by which psychic structure itself was created - the superego built up from the residues of parents, educators and exemplars. 12.  The power of states - Freud understood this as projection whereby people externalise the contents, or structures or relations of the internal world.  Hamlet seeing the world 'flat, stale and unprofitable' because of his own miserable state.  Freud went further with this not just states, but the projection of aggression, fears, bad experiences, needs and dependencies.  Projecting things from our minds into other people. 13.  Listening with Indifference during psychoanalysis - this is in many sense a 'Know nothing state' - this 'evenly hovering attention' must refuse to make one thing more important than another. 14.  Propulsion systems - Freud determined that a lot of things people do is an attempt at flight - to run away from bits of themseleves they cannot face. 15.  Freud noted resistance, as pathogenic memories alienated from the conscious mind, and that was the level to work at.   Freud identified the importance of leverage and utilising appropriate entry points for intervention. 16.  Freud discovered the concept know as secondary gain - noticed there was secondary gains from certain symptoms etc.. 17.  Freud developed Reframing - whereby he'd confront the patient in offering a different way of looking at things. 18.  Freud emphasised the patient (or analysand) as utilising their resources, and the analyst role as merely a facilitor for change. 19.  Freud develop the idea of utilising anything the anlysand presents. 20.  Representations - Freud was original in exploring mental representations. Would we have fundamental tennants of NLP without Freud? - I doubt it.