Kurt Koffka

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Kurt Koffka (born March 18, 1886 in Berlin, Germany; died in 1941 in Northampton, Massachusetts), was a German psychologist who, together with Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler, established Gestalt psychology.

Life

Kurt Koffka was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1886. He finished his early education under the guidance of his uncle, who evoked his interest in philosophy and science. Koffka attended Wilhelms Gymnasium, and later the University of Berlin, where he studied together with philosopher Alois Riehl. In 1904, he continued his studies at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland where he became familiar with British philosophy. Two years later he returned to Berlin, changing his major from philosophy to psychology.

Koffka became interested in human perception. One of his first published works was a study on his own color-blindness. He later completed his doctorate degree under Carl Stumpf at the University of Berlin, with work on the perception of musical and visual rhythms.

Koffka married Mira Klein, who assisted him as his subject in his doctoral research.

In 1909, Koffka moved to the University of Freiburg, to practice under the guidance of physiologist Johannes von Kries, in the medical department. However, Koffka stayed in Freiburg only a short time, moving again a few years later. He became an assistant to Oswald Külpe and Karl Marbe at the University of Würzburg, which was one of the major centers of experimental psychology of the time.

In 1910 Koffka decided to leave Wurzburg and continue his research at the Psychological Institute in Frankfurt am Main, under professor Friedrich Schumann. There he met Wolfgang Kohler, and that same year they joined Max Wertheimer in his laboratory studying motion perception. The three of them became lifelong partners and established the foundation of Gestalt psychology.

In 1911 Koffka left to the University of Giessen to become a lecturer, but still maintained close relationship with Kohler and Wertheimer. The focus of his research now turned to thinking and memory. At the beginning of the World War I Koffka moved to Giessen, where he stayed several years. He started his research on sound, working short time for the military. After the finish of the war, Koffka was accepted at the full time position of professor in experimental psychology at the University of Giessen.

In 1921 he became a director of the Psychology Institute at Giessen, where he founded his own laboratory. Together with his students, and in cooperation with Köhler and Wertheimer, he published numerous articles in the area of Gestalt psychology. One of the first articles in English language Koffka wrote in 1922, the time when he started to implement many of his ideas from experimental psychology into developmental psychology. He proposed the hypothesis of infant perception, saying that infants cannot at first distinguish individual objects, but perceive everything holistically. As they grow older infants learn to discriminate and respond to individual sensations from the environment.

When in 1922 he published his ideas of Gestalt understanding of perception and its application to development, his work soon become extremely popular, and was soon translated into numerous languages. It was published under the name The Growth of the Mind: An Introduction to Child Psychology. This work will set up the foundation for many later theories of development. However, despite his sudden popularity, Koffka didn’t find favor among traditional German scholars. At the time, Gestalt ideas were still opposed by majority of German psychologists. Koffka decided to move to America. His friend, American psychologist Robert Ogden, helped Koffka introduce the Gestalt point of view to an American audience in 1922, through a paper in Psychological Bulletin. This was the beginning of a new phase in Koffka’s life.

In 1923 he divorced his wife and married Elisabeth Ahlgrimm. The marriage however didn’t last long, and Koffka returned back to his first wife. From 1924 till 1927 he lectured at Cornell and the University of Wisconsin, and in 1927 he became a research professor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he stayed until his death. In 1928 Koffka divorced again from his first wife and remarried his second wife, Elisabeth Ahlgrimm, for the second time.

The years spent at Smith College were some of the most productive in Koffka’s life. In 1935 he summed up his research in Smith College in the four-volume Smith College Studies in Psychology (1930-1933). In the same year, and after an unsuccessful research expedition to Uzbekistan, Koffka published his seminal work, the one he will remain the most famous for - Principles of Gestalt Psychology. In it Koffka summarizes his life-long, hard work in the area of Gestalt psychology.

In 1939 he was invited to teach in Oxford, where he extended his research to brain-damage. He started to work with patients at the Military Hospital, developing his famous method for evaluating brain-damage.

In the next two years Koffka started to experience serious health problems, that limited his ability to do research. However, he continued to teach at Smith College. He died in 1941 from coronary thrombosis.

Work

Together with Kohler and Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka set the foundation for the Gestalt psychology. Their approach directly opposed the mechanistic psychology of the nineteenth century, which saw human experience in terms of separate sensations. Rather than focusing on the components of reality and reducing perception to its parts, as Wundt proposed, Koffka suggested that humans perceive things as whole. Objects around us - for example, a tree or a house - are seen as whole, not as a set of lines, colors, and other elements of which they are made of. Koffka claimed that human mind organizes individual experiences into meaningful wholes, and thus there is no need to talk about structure of human experience, but only of the experience itself. The goals of Gestalt psychology is thus to investigate the organization of mental activity and to determine the nature of person-environment interaction.

Müller-Lyer Illusion

In the beginning of his academic inquiry, Koffka studied movement phenomena and psychological aspects of rhythm. His early work combined elements of physiology and experimental psychology. When in 1935 Koffka published his Principles of Gestalt Psychology, he tried to sum up all the research on perception and present the basic ideas of Gestalt movement. Koffka rejected the totalitarian approach in psychology, which took for granted that veridical perception needs not to be explained. For example, it was always thought that certain elements that comprise objects are fixed. A line that is 3 inches long will always be longer than a 2-inch one. Such line will also always look longer. Koffka however showed that when certain elements, like a 3-inch long line, are combined with other elements, our perception of those elements changes. Famous examples of this are the Ponzo and Müller-Lyer illusions. Koffka thus claimed that psychologists always need to start with the question “Why do things look as they do?".

Ponzo Illusion

Koffka believed that psychologists always need to look at the things holistically, in the context of where these things are. The purpose of science in general, is not to simply collect facts, but to incorporate facts into a theoretical whole. Theoretical systems must incorporate all the facts, and create a rational system of facts. Since all the facts are interdependent, successful theoretical system will not deny or neglect not even the smallest fact. Koffka criticized those scientists who create theoretical systems based on facts that fit into their system, while deny facts that do not fit. The Gestalt theoretical system takes all the facts into consideration, says Koffka. It incorporates mind, life, and inanimate nature into the same system. The science itself needs to incorporate facts from all three spheres into one system.

One of the most important categories that science needs to take into account is order. Koffka held that among living things there is certain order, which cannot be seen on inorganic level. "In inorganic nature you find nothing but the interplay of blind mechanical forces, but when you come to life you find order, and that means a new agency that directs the workings of inorganic nature, giving aim and direction and thereby order to its blind impulses" (p. 16). Koffka also suggested that science needs to take into account yet another category – Sinn – which can be translated like “meaning” or “ value”. Koffka believed that science needs to incorporate meaning and value into its system

Legacy

Building upon the German phenomenology of the 19th century, and the act psychology of Brentano and Stumpf, Koffka, Kohler and Wertheimer combined philosophy of phenomenology with experimental psychology, creating a new system in psychology that directly opposed Wundtian school which influenced German psychology of the time. Koffka was the one who systematized Gestalt ideas into a coherent system of theories. As the main spokesman of the Gestalt movement, he helped spread Gestalt ideas across Europe, and later into United States. He managed to apply those ideas into practice, such extending Gestalt theories onto developmental psychology, especially in the areas of perception, learning, and interpretation.

Bibliography

Koffka, K. (1922). Perception: An introduction to the Gestalt-theory. Psychological Bulletin, 19, 531-585.

Koffka, K. (1924). The growth of the mind (R. M. Ogden, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1921)

Koffka, K. (1935). Principles of Gestalt psychology New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World.

External links

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