Reframing. Neuro–Linguistic Programming™ and the Transformation of Meaning

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Reframing is not new. Many fables and fairy tales include behaviors or events that change their meaning when the frames around them change. The different–looking chick seems to be an ugly duckling, but he turns out to be a swan—more beautiful than the ducks he has been comparing himself to. Reindeer Rudolfs funny–looking red nose becomes useful for guiding Santa's sleigh on a foggy night.

Reframing also appears in almost every joke. What seems to be one thing, suddenly shifts and becomes something else.

1) «What's green all over and has wheels?»

2) «What do Alexander the Great and Smokey the Bear have in common?»

(Answers appear at the end of this introduction.)

Reframing is also the pivotal element in the creative process: it is the ability to put a commonplace event in a new frame that is useful or enjoyable. A friend of physicist Donald Glaser pointed to a glass of beer and jokingly said «Why don't you use that to catch your subatomic particles?» Glaser looked at the bubbles forming in the beer, and went back to his lab to invent the «bubble chamber," similar to the Wilson cloud chamber, for detecting the paths of particles in high–energy physics experiments. Arthur Koestler, in The Act of Creation, calls this process «bisociation»: the ability to simultaneously associate an event in two very separate and different contexts.

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