Kurt Koffka

Cofounds Gestalt psychology, Applies Gestalt principles to child development

1886-1941

German-American experimental psychologist and a founder of the Gestalt movement.

Working with Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Koffka helped establish the theories of Gestalt
psychology. It was Koffka who promoted this new psychology in Europe and introduced it to the United
States. He was responsible for systematizing Gestalt psychology into a coherent body of theories. He
extended Gestalt theories to developmental psychology, and his ideas about perception, interpretation,
and learning influenced American educational theories and policies.

The son of Emil Koffka, a lawyer and royal councilor of law, and Luise Levi (or Levy), Koffka was born in
Berlin, Germany, in 1886. His early education was in the hands of an English-speaking governess, and his
mother's brother, a biologist, fostered his early interests in philosophy and science. After attending the
Wilhelms Gymnasium and passing his exams, Koffka studied at the University of Berlin with the
philosopher Alois Riehl. In 1904-1905, Koffka studied at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland,
improving his English and becoming acquainted with British scientists and scholars. Upon returning to
Berlin, he changed his studies from philosophy to psychology.

Koffka's first published research, an examination of his own color blindness, was carried out in the
physiology laboratory of Wilibald Nagel. Koffka completed his doctoral research at Berlin, on the
perception of musical and visual rhythms, under Carl Stumpf, one of the major experimental
psychologists of the time.

Cofounds Gestalt psychology

Koffka moved to the University of Freiburg in 1909, as assistant to the physiologist Johannes von Kries, a
professor on the medical faculty. Shortly thereafter, he became an assistant to Oswald Külpe and Karl
Marbe at the University of Würzburg, a major center of experimental psychology. That same year, Koffka
married Mira Klein, who had been an experimental subject for his doctoral research. It was Koffka's next
move, in 1910, that was to prove the most fateful for his career. Koffka and Köhler both went to work as
assistants to Friedrich Schumann at the Psychological Institute in Frankfurt am Main. They shared a
laboratory with Wertheimer, who was studying the perception of motion. Soon, Wertheimer, Koffka, and
Köhler were establishing the theoretical and experimental basis of Gestalt psychology. Their new
approach rejected the mechanistic psychology of the nineteenth century, which had attempted to
reduce experience and perception into smaller components or sensations. Instead, they favored a
holistic approach to perception. Wertheimer had studied with the phenomenologist Christian von
Ehrenfels, and the three scientists tried to combine this philosophy with experimental methods. Koffka
left to take a position as lecturer at the

Kurt Koffka (Archives of the History of American Psychology. Reproduced with permission.)

University of Giessen in 1911, where he continued his experimental research on visual perception and
began new studies on memory and thinking. However he maintained his close association with
Wertheimer and Köhler.

In 1914, Koffka began studying hearing impairments in brain-damaged patients, with Robert Sommer,
the director of the Psychiatric Clinic at Giessen. During the First World War, he also worked for the
military on localization of sound. Koffka was promoted to a professorship in experimental psychology in
1918, a position that increased his teaching responsibilities but not his salary. In 1921, when he became
director of the Psychology Institute at Giessen, he was forced to raise his own funds to set up his new
laboratory. Nevertheless, Koffka and his students published numerous experimental studies over the
next few years, including 18 publications in the Gestalt journal founded and edited by Wertheimer,
Köhler, and Koffka.

Applies Gestalt principles to child development

Koffka's major work extending Gestalt theory to developmental psychology was published in 1921. He
maintained that infants first perceive and respond holistically. Only later are they able to perceive the
individual sensations that comprise the whole. Soon, Koffka was being invited to lecture in the United
States, where his ideas were well received by psychologists. In 1922, he published his first English-
language paper, on Gestalt theories of perception, in Psychological Bulletin. Robert Ogden, the editor of
the Bulletin, translated Koffka's work on developmental psychology, and it was published in 1924 as The
Growth of the Mind: An Introduction to Child Psychology. Translated into numerous languages, this work
had a major influence on theories of learning and development. In 1923, Koffka divorced his wife and
married Elisabeth Ahlgrimm, who had just finished her Ph.D. at Giessen. However, they were divorced in
the same year and he remarried his first wife.

Gestalt psychology was strongly opposed by the traditional psychologists of German academia, and
Koffka, as the public advocate for Gestalt, encountered many obstacles to advancement in Germany.
Therefore, he spent 1924-1925 as a visiting professor at Cornell University and 1926-1927 at the
University of Wisconsin. In 1927, Koffka was offered a five-year appointment as the William Allan Neilson
Research Professor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. The non-teaching position included
an equipped and funded laboratory staffed with assistants. He continued his research on visual
perception, and his results were published in the four-volume Smith College Studies in Psychology (1930-
1933), as well as in the German Gestalt journal that he continued to edit. Koffka remained a professor of
psychology at Smith until his death. In 1928, he was divorced again and he remarried his second wife,
Ahlgrimm.
Koffka undertook a research expedition to Uzbekistan in 1932, with funding from the Soviet Union.
However an attack of relapsing fever, an infection transmitted by lice and ticks, forced him to return
home. On the way back, he began writing his classic contribution to psychology, Principles of Gestalt
Psychology, published in 1935. Drawing on his lifetime of experiments, he extended Gestalt theory to
many areas of psychology, including memory and learning. In his later lectures and writings, Koffka
applied Gestalt principles to a wide range of political, ethical, social, and artistic subjects. In 1939, as a
visiting professor at Oxford, he worked with brain-damaged patients at the Military Hospital for Head
Injuries. There, he developed the widely adopted evaluation methods for such patients. Although heart
disease began to restrict his activities, Koffka continued teaching at Smith until a few days before his
death in 1941 from coronary thrombosis.