“Now,” says Vish. “When I want to sell you something, I’ll touch your elbow and you’ll associate that touch with a good feeling, and you’ll want to buy. That’s deep psychology.” Vish pauses. “What I really like about NLP is how it can hypnotize and manipulate people. But in a good way.”

•   •   •

I STAND UP to stretch my legs and I spot Paul McKenna at the front, near the stage. Even though I’m still supposed to be doing the small-group workshop, I decide to introduce myself. I take a few steps toward McKenna. Instantly, one of his assistants swoops down on me. There are about forty assistants in all, scattered around the room.

“Do you need help?” she asks me.

“No,” I say.

“Have you finished the workshop already?” she asks sarcastically.

“Yes,” I say.

“Well, you must have finished quicker than everyone else because everyone else is still doing it,” she says.

“I’m a journalist and I’m going to talk to Paul McKenna,” I say.

I walk on. Ten steps later, two more assistants appear from nowhere.

“Aren’t you joining in?” asks one.

“You’re going to miss all the benefits,” says the other.

“I’m OK, honestly,” I say.

Another assistant appears.

“Didn’t you understand your instruction?” he says. “Paul explained three times that you’re supposed to do the workshop for fifteen minutes.”

Finally, exhausted, I reach Paul McKenna. I introduce myself.

“How did you end up in business with Richard Bandler?” I ask him.

“I know!” he says. “It seems incredible from the outside. But he’s one of my best friends . . .” Then he excuses himself to do a spot of speed-healing on an overeater.

•   •   •

AN HOUR LATER Paul McKenna’s PR rep, Jaime, tells me in the corridor quite sternly that I am not to hang out with Paul or Richard before, between, or after sessions because they’re far too busy and tired. I can meet them next Wednesday, she says, when the course is over. I go home. I don’t think I have ever, in all my life, had so many people try to control me in one single day. Advocates and critics alike say attaining a mastery of NLP can be an excellent way of controlling people, so I suppose the training courses attract that sort of person. Ross Jeffries, author of How to Get the Women You Desire into Bed, is a great NLP fan, as is Duane Lakin, author of The Unfair Advantage: Sell with NLP! (Both books advocate the “That feels good to me” style of mirroring/rapport-building invented by Bandler.)

But still, the controlling didn’t work on me. Nobody successfully got inside my head and changed—for their benefit—the way I saw NLP. In fact, quite the opposite happened. This makes me wonder if NLP even works.

E-mails and telephone calls fly back and forth. I tell Jaime the PR rep that I don’t want to be kept away from Richard Bandler during the sessions. Finally it is agreed I can meet him before he goes onstage on Monday.

•   •   •

THINGS IMPROVE. There’s a nice, normal delegate here called Nick who teaches executives how to be good public speakers.

“These group things are always a bit creepy,” he says, “but that isn’t the point. The point is that NLP isn’t bogus.”

I tell Nick about Vish noticeably prodding me in the elbow.

“Well, he was just doing it badly,” says Nick. “Honestly. NLP is the most sensible thing out there.”

I corner Paul McKenna and tell him his assistants are driving me crazy.

“You have to make them leave me alone,” I say.

He looks mortified and says they’re just overexcited and trying too hard. But, he adds, the course would be a lot worse without them energizing the stragglers into practicing NLP techniques on one another.

Onstage, Bandler and McKenna cure a stream of delegates of their phobias and compulsions. There’s a woman who’s barely left her home for years, convinced the heater will turn itself on when she’s out and burn the house down.

“Do they pay you to think like this?” asks Bandler. “It seems like an awful lot of work. Aren’t you fucking sick of it?”

The woman says a bossy voice in her head tells her the heater will do this.

Bandler gets her to turn down the knob in her brain that controls the volume of the bossy voice.

Then he gets the bossy voice to tell her, “If you keep worrying about this heater, you’re going to miss out on everything good in your life.”

This, Bandler explains, is an invention of his called the Swish technique: You take a bad thought, turn it into a radio or TV image, and then swish it away, replacing it with a good thought.

“I don’t care about you anymore, heater, because I want to get my life back,” the woman says, and the audience cheers.

I still don’t quite understand the Swish technique, and so I make a mental note to get Paul McKenna to do it on me when I meet him at his house on Wednesday. I have a whole potpourri of bad thoughts I wouldn’t mind swishing away.

•   •   •

YESTERDAY RICHARD BANDLER cured someone who had a fear of doctors. Now he gets him to stand up.

“Are you scared of going to the doctor?” he asks.

“I . . . uh . . . hope not,” the man quietly replies.

“BOO!” shouts the audience, only half-good-naturedly.

Suddenly, I feel a poke in my elbow. I spin around. It is Vish. I catch him in the act of giving my elbow a second poke.

“Did that make you feel good?” he asks me.

“It made me feel confused,” I say.

When someone appears cured, Bandler and McKenna seem quietly, sincerely thrilled. I’m sure they derive real pleasure from helping damaged people improve their lives. And the room truly is scattered with NLP success stories. There are the shy salespeople who aren’t shy anymore, the arachnophobes who swish away their spider phobias and stroke the tarantulas Paul McKenna provides one afternoon.

Onstage each day, McKenna is a mix of entertainer and college lecturer. He tells a joke and then he says, “What was I just doing?”

“REFRAMING!” the audience yells as one. (Reframing is NLP’s way of putting a miserable person in a good mood. If someone says, “My wife’s always nagging me,” the NLP-trained therapist will “reframe” by replying, “She must really care about you to tell you what she thinks.”) I sit in the audience and watch all this, and back at home in the evenings I talk to friends who, it transpires, secretly listen to Paul McKenna’s CDs and get cured.

There’s another speaker here: the life coach Michael Neill, author of You Can Have What You Want. One day Michael asks me if I can spot the covert intelligence officers in the audience.

“I’m not joking,” he says. “There’s always one or two.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Most people who want to get inside your brain,” says Michael, moving closer to me, “have negative reasons.”

Michael tells me about an oil-executive friend who only ever uses NLP for bad, to “mess people up.” In busy bars his friend frantically “mismatches.” He sits at a crowded table, uses NLP to establish rapport with strangers, and then behaves in the exact opposite way to what he knows would make them feel comfortable. Before long he has the table to himself. Then Michael adds, “Anyone who knows NLP will have an advantage over anyone who doesn’t. My dream is for everyone in the world to know NLP. Then there’d be an even playing field.”

Paul McKenna, standing nearby, comes over. He scans the room. When the six hundred delegates graduate in a few days, they’ll be given Licensed NLP Practitioner certificates. Some will set up their own NLP training schools. He says he cannot guard against what happens next.

“Some people teach NLP in a way that makes it sound highly manipulative and coercive,” McKenna says. “You know, ‘I will give you power over others.’ And the people who end up going to those are people with very small penises, frankly. People who think, ‘Oh my God! I’m not enough! I’m so out of control! Maybe if I learned how to have power over others, I’d be a better person!’ So you see that criticizing NLP is like criticizing a hammer.”