Kurt Koffka

German psychologist (1886–1941), one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology and the man who explained it to the English-speaking world. He studied in Berlin under Carl Stumpf, worked at Frankfurt from 1910, and it was there that he and Wolfgang Köhler served as the observers in Max Wertheimer's experiments on apparent motion — two men at a tachistoscope, watching a light that was not moving and seeing it move.

From that collaboration came a research programme rather than a single finding: that experience arrives already organised into wholes, that the properties of those wholes are not built up from independent elements, and that the elements are what analysis produces rather than what perception delivers. Koffka spent the following decade at Giessen extending the approach to development, and his The Growth of the Mind (1921) applied Gestalt principles to the child, against both the associationism that made learning a chaining of bonds and the maturation theories that made it an unfolding.

His 1922 article in the Psychological Bulletin, Perception: an Introduction to the Gestalt-Theorie, was for most American readers the first coherent account of the school, though its title left them with the lasting impression — which he spent years correcting — that Gestalt psychology was a theory of perception alone. He moved permanently to Smith College in 1927, and his Principles of Gestalt Psychology (1935) is the school's fullest statement in English: a large, difficult book that sets out the distinction between the geographical environment and the behavioural one, the field theory of action, and the claim that psychology and physics describe the same kind of ordered wholes.