According to Maria Pachalska, poetry represents a fourth strand in the fabric of microgenetic theory, along with neuropsychology, psychiatry (chiefly psychoanalysis), and philosophy. If, as Jason W. Brown observed several years ago, genetic psychology may be characterized generally as “the study of micro- or macro-trends in the development of the mind,” then microgenetic theory, as a pioneering account relating the structure of a mental state to brain activity, seeks to establish “a more precise formulation of the phase-transitions underlying the momentary ‘growth’ of a given perception from an intra- to extra-psychic locus.” This conversation will consider the roles poetry may have played in the formulation of microgenetic theory, as well as the ways in which poets from Goethe to Ashbery may be said to have anticipated the insights of microgenetic theory, and even investigated microgenetic processes in their writing.

Jason W. Brown is Clinical Professor of Neurology (ret.) at the New York University Medical Center. Author of a dozen books, among them Aphasia, Apraxia and Agnosia; Mind, Brain and Consciousness; Mind and Nature: Essays on Time and Subjectivity; The Self-Embodying Mind; and Process and the Authentic Life, he is currently working on Neuropsychological Foundations of Conscious Experience. He was recently the subject of Neuropsychology and the Philosophy of Mind in Process: Essays in Honor of Jason W. Brown. In addition to positions at the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital and the NYU Medical Center, he has served as Director of Neurology at both St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx and Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island. He also directed his own neuropsychology laboratory at Bellevue Hospital, and recently served as a Visiting Scholar at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

Steven Meyer is Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where he specializes in twentieth-century poetry and relationships between literature, science and philosophy. Author of Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science, and of articles on the poets Laura Riding, James Merrill, Geoffrey Hill, John Ashberry, and Jay Wright, he is at present completing Robust Empiricisms: Jamesian Modernism between the Disciplines, 1880 to the Present, which examines several strains of expanded empiricism in the past century. He has been awarded fellowships at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center and the Stanford Humanities Center, and is currently an affiliated scholar at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers.