User:Dolph Kohnstamm

I am a retired professor of developmental psychology at Leiden University, The Netherlands. I am 69 years old.

User Dr Joe Kiff (alias Lifeartist) introduced me to this Psychology Wiki during the Wikimania conference in Cambridge, Mass. in August 2006.

I am actively involved in improving the quality of the psychology portal and articles in the Dutch Wikipedia. I have recently begun inviting former colleagues from Dutch Universities to contribute their knowledge to Wikipedia, and to help raise the quality in the domains of psychology and pedagogy.

I will use this page primarily for showing a few chapters from a book that will be published by Athena Press in London, in february 2007. The book is on recollections some adults have of a striking 'I-am-me' experience in childhood or early adolescence. So far my collection of such memories is limited to what readers from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Switzerland have sent me. Earlier versions of this book were then published in Amsterdam (2002, in Dutch) and in Bern (2004, in German). The purpose of showing those chapters here is to invite anglophone adults who remember having had similar experiences in their childhood years to write me confidentially* or to entrust their recollections directly to this medium. I also invite them to give us their view on what the experience meant for them, in childhood, and, more in general, how they see such experiences fit in what we know about the development of self-awareness.


 * My home address is: Prinsengracht 792, 1017 LH Amsterdam, the Netherlands.