NLP has been developed in 1970s by Richard Bandler as a criticism of psychology. His criticism was that psychology was wrong to think that they could get objective knowledge about mankind. NLP on the other hand focuses on the subjective experience people have rather than a hopeless quest for objectivity.
However gratefully we might approach the objective spirit – and who hasn’t been sick to death at least once of everything subjective, with its damned ipsissimosity! – nevertheless, in the end we even have to be cautious of our gratitude, and put an end to the exaggerated terms in which people have recently been celebrating the desubjectivization and depersonification of spirit, as if this were some sort of goal in itself, some sort of redemption or transfiguration. This kind of thing tends to happen within the pessimist school, which has reasons of its own for regarding “disinterested knowing” with the greatest respect. The objective man who no longer swears or complains like the pessimist does, the ideal scholar who expresses the scientific instinct as it finally blossoms and blooms all the way (after things have gone partly or wholly wrong a thousand times over) – he is certainly one of the most expensive tools there is: but he belongs in the hands of someone more powerful. He is only a tool, we will say: he is a mirror, – he is not an “end in himself.” The objective man is really a mirror: he is used to subordinating himself in front of anything that wants to be known, without any other pleasure than that of knowing, of “mirroring forth.” He waits until something comes along and then spreads himself gently towards it, so that even light footsteps and the passing by of a ghostly being are not lost on his surface and skin. He has so thoroughly become a passageway and reflection of strange shapes and events, that whatever is left in him of a “person” strikes him as accidental, often arbitrary, and still more often as disruptive. It takes an effort for him to think back on “himself,” and he is not infrequently mistaken when he does. He easily confuses himself with others, he is wrong about his own basic needs, and this is the only respect in which he is crude and careless. Maybe his health is making him suffer, or the pettiness and provincial airs of a wife or a friend, or the lack of companions and company, – all right then, he makes himself think about his sufferings: but to no avail! His thoughts have already wandered off, towards more general issues, and by the next day he does not know how to help himself any more than he knew the day before. He has lost any serious engagement with the issue as well as the time to spend on it: he is cheerful, not for lack of needs but for lack of hands to grasp his neediness. The obliging manner in which he typically approaches things and experiences, the sunny and natural hospitality with which he accepts everything that comes at him, his type of thoughtless goodwill, of dangerous lack of concern for Yeses and Noes: oh, there are plenty of times when he has to pay for these virtues of his! – and being human, he all too easily becomes the worthless residue of these virtues. If you want him to love or hate (I mean love and hate as a god, woman, or animal would understand the terms –) he will do what he can and give what he can. But do not be surprised if it is not much, – if this is where he comes across as fake, fragile, questionable, and brittle. His love is forced, his hatred artificial and more like un tour de force, a little piece of vanity and exaggeration. He is sincere only to the extent that he is allowed to be objective: he is “nature” and “natural” only in his cheerful totality. His mirror-like soul is forever smoothing itself out; it does not know how to affirm or negate any more. He does not command; and neither does he destroy. “Je ne m´eprise presque rien”, he says with Leibniz: that presque should not be overlooked or underestimated! He is no paragon of humanity; he does not go in front of anyone or behind. In general, he puts himself at too great a distance to have any basis for choosing between good or evil. If people have mistaken him for a philosopher for so long, for a Caesar-like man who cultivates and breeds, for the brutal man of culture – then they have paid him much too high an honor and overlooked what is most essential about him, – he is a tool, a piece of slave (although, without a doubt, the most sublime type of slave) but nothing in himself, – presque rien! The objective person is a tool, an expensive measuring instrument and piece of mirror art that is easily injured and spoiled and should be honored and protected; but he is not a goal, not a departure or a fresh start, he is not the sort of complementary person in which the rest of existence justifies itself. He is not a conclusion – and still less a beginning, begetter or first cause; there is nothing tough, powerful or self-supporting that wants to dominate. Rather, he is only a gentle, brushed-off, refined, agile pot of forms, who first has to wait for some sort of content or substance in order “to shape” himself accordingly, – he is generally a man without substance or content, a “selfless” man. And consequently, in parenthesi, nothing for women. –
Beyond Good & Evil paragraph 207