1st Edition
First Moments of Self-awareness in Childhood A Phenomenological Approach
This thought-provoking volume explores the phenomenon of childhood experiences of sudden moments of self-awareness. Locating them as meaningful developmental events, it draws on, and is illustrated by, detailed analysis of individuals’ narratives of inner experience and recollections of childhood.
Uniquely highlighting the relevant writings of literary figures such as C.G. Jung, Vladimir Nabokov, Ian McEwan, and Henning Mankell, Dolph Kohnstamm explores the construction of selfhood, and the effects it has on time, space, and the other. Together with a chapter assessing the role of the default brain network in the development of self-conception, it both supports and challenges theories of development.
First Moments of Self-awareness in Childhood offers a new conception of children’s development of a sense of individuality and will be of great interest to scholars and students of psychology, philosophy, and sociology.
1 The development of self-awareness
2 Sudden insight
3 Sudden self-awareness among authors
4 Awareness of being
5 I am I, and not someone else
6 I can sometimes put myself in someone else's shoes
7 Like I was looking at myself from the outside
8 This is my body, I am alive!
9 The firmament and the sunlight
10 Past times, from now to the end
11 Mirrors
12 Extraordinary experiences of joy
13 Other sudden insights
14 Sudden cognitive insights
15 A mind-wandering network
16 Coda
Biography
Dolph Kohnstamm is Professor Emeritus in Developmental Psychology, Leiden University, Netherlands. He is the author of works including Parental Descriptions of Child Personality, Temperament in Context, and Jean Piaget, Children and the Class-Inclusion Problem.
