The Structure of Magic (Volume I) is a remarkable book and one that should certainly be read by anyone interested in NLP. It forms the basis of most of the ideas underpinning NLP and explains them much better than many of the books that came after. Like experience and our representation of experience in ‘deep structure’, many of the ideas have gone through a little too much generalization, distortion, and deletion 🙂
The book is dated, but still highly valuable in its insights. I read it years ago and then came back to it again recently and gained a lot more out of the second reading. The descriptions of the metamodel and the examples of actual therepeutic interventions were much richer for me this time around, probably because the metamodel has become a much more hard-wired resource for my behaviour. It takes a long time to internalize these powerful ideas and revisiting the originals from time to time always gives a useful new perspective both on the original ideas and on your personal progression over time.
Chapter 3 and 4 are very practical, and Chapter 6 gives an excellent (if rather dated) description of the Metamodel’s usage within other therapeutic systems.
The Structure of Magic emerged out of Richard Bandler’s thesis and is a fine blend of theory and practice.