Brief biography

I was born in the Netherlands in 1962 and grew up in a family with five children. My father was an accountant and my mother mainly a housewife.

After attending successively schools of lower and higher general secondary education, I started studying personnel management in 1982. Two years later, I was able to follow my heart by switching to psychological studies at Utrecht University. There I graduated in 1990 (clinical and theoretical psychology).

Due to the shortage of  employment for psychologists at the time, I was forced to search for another job. Finally, I managed to find a job as an attendant of people with a mental disability. Unfortunately, this employment ended in 2016. At the moment, I attend an English translation course (both directions).

In 2001 I met my wife, who brought my two beautiful sons into this world in 2007 and 2008. As a hobby I run, usually with two runs of 10 kilometers a year.

Origin of psychostratics

Towards the end of my psychology studies, I started developing a layered model of the mind. At first, this model sprang from books by the Dutch psychologist Piet Vroon (1939-1998), who was very famous in the Netherlands at that time, but whose works have never been published in English, unfortunately. Later on I also drew from the main source of Vroon’s work for my layered model of the mind, namely the well-known triune brain theory by the American neuroscientist Paul MacLean. When working on the layered model, I was supervised, also after my graduation, by Dr. Geert Panhuysen of Utrecht University, who drew my attention to MacLean’s works. Unfortunately, further on the road of developing the layered model, he was not able to help me anymore, and I was intellectually on my own.

My interest in the stratification of brain and mind, however, dates back even further. Even as a young man, I was impressed by Carl Sagan’s description of the triune brain theory in his book The Dragons of Eden. At that time, my persistent interest in that other layered view on the mind, psychoanalysis, also awakened, when I put forward a view on religion and my eldest brother told me it was similar to Freud’s.

Besides my work as an attendant, and later on the care of my sons, I kept working on my stratification views, which would eventually turn into psychostratics. However, these views have seen two important changes over the years. First, the relative contribution of psychological views (especially psychoanalysis) to my stratification views has increased at the expense of neuropsychological views (mainly triune brain theory). But this diminished relative importance of triune brain theory does not alter the facts that this theory is the foundation of psychostratics and that this existence of a biological base constitutes a crucial difference with that other stratification view, psychoanalysis.

The second important change that my stratification views have undergone is that of a topical (“static”) model to a developmental psychology model, distinguishing five possible phases. These changes and others eventually resulted in psychostratics. My motivation for this hard labor stems from my belief that psychostratics has the potency to unify the multitude of contemporary psychology views.