KOFFKA, KURT

KOFFKA, KURT (1886–1941), U.S. psychologist; one of the founders of Gestalt psychology. He was born and educated in Berlin. Working as an assistant at Frankfurt, he came under the influence of max wertheimer and served as a subject in the first studies of apparent movement that became the starting point of the Gestalt school of psychology. Gestalt theory rejected the notion that consciousness is built up of separate elements and substituted the view that experience was organized in whole patterns (i.e., Gestalten). Appointed in 1911 to Giessen, Koffka tried to deal with the problem of development, publishing Growth of the Mind (1925). With the aid of his "convergence theory," similar to the views of william stern , he tried to show that every capacity is the result of the convergence of inner capacities and outer conditions of development. Goals are seen as an attempt to bring about closure. Insight replaces trial and error learning. In 1921 he founded the journal Psychologische Forschung, together with Wertheimer, Koehler, Goldstein, and Gruhle, to publish the results of the new school, to which most American psychologists were introduced by his article: "Perception: An Introduction to the Gestalt-Theory" in Psychological Bulletin, 19 (1922), 531–85. Unfortunately this article had the effect of making Gestalt psychology appear to be only a perceptual theory. Koffka went to the United States in 1924, and in 1927 took up permanent residence as professor at Smith College. In 1932 he joined an expedition to Uzbekistan in Central Asia. In his own words, "the official task of the expedition was to study the dependence of the mental functions of a people upon the historico-economic conditions of their country." On his return he embarked on his monumental Principles of Gestalt Psychology (1935). In this work Koffka attempted a comprehensive Gestalt theory covering learning, memory, emotion, and personality. He introduced the concept of the organismic field, the total field of interacting forces governing behavior. He distinguished the environment as it appears to an individual, the "behavioral environment," from the real environment. The Gestalt principles of organization explain why the behavioral environment corresponds as well as it does to the real environment. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: S.H. MacColl, Comparative Study of the Systems of Lewin and Koffka… (1939).