Microgenetic Theory meets Spatiotemporal Neuroscience: Situating the Neurodaonamic Psychotherapy Framewdork in Process Neuroscience

Abstract

The brain can be viewed as a multitiered evolutionary organ. Jason Brown’s microgenetic theory stipulates that the mind unfolds through successive phases from the brain stem, through the limbic system, towards the outer limits of the cortex, recapitulating the brain’s evolutionary and developmental history. While this progression and its phases have been documented throughout the literature, it currently lacks specificity in relation to neural networks such as the default mode network, the salience network, and the central executive network. Given that spatiotemporal neuroscience is process-oriented and already embeds large-scale neural networks within empirically derived spatial topographies and temporal dynamics, it provides a natural integrative framework for linking microgenetic theory with contemporary network-based models of brain function. This article concludes by demonstrating how this synthesis can be applied in practice by using it to ground a novel, process-oriented psychotherapeutic meta-framework, the neurodynamic approach. This article first aims to further develop the microgenetic theory from the work of Jason Brown. In contrast to the reigning paradigmatic neuropsychological approach, which attempts to localize neural and cognitive functioning within specific brain structures and regions, the microgenetic approach is a process-oriented approach that conceptualizes mental contents as evolving through the successive evolutionary layers of neural substrate. In this sense, mental processes are not fixed, static, and localized, but follow a spatiotemporal dynamic sequence as they unfold.