The Microgenetic Theory of Mind and Brain

This book asks where ideas, objects and feelings come from and how they arise via an exploration of the nature of subjective experience and its relation to the world. Seeking an explanation for the experience of subjective duration and the present and, in contrast to the conception of mental events as non-temporal logical solids, it explores a diachronic processual theory founded on psychological data and clinical observation that provides an explanatory “system” of thought adequate to the phenomena it is called on to explain. The author focuses on the intra-psychic sources and nature of subjective experience, with the intent of examining a variety of phenomena from the standpoint of microgenetic theory. The chapters deal with the origins of human subjectivity and the epochal nature of time and duration, change and the relevance of a theory of the mental state to dream, and the waking present. Based on speculative psychology that flows from case studies in neuropsychology and concepts in process philosophy, it advances a theory of mind and brain that brings together previous, fragmentary research studies on this topic.