Kurt KoffkaBorn 18 Mar 1886; died 22 Nov 1941 at age 55. German-American psychologist who co-founded, with Wolfgang Köhler and Max Wertheimer, the Gestalt school of psychology. Koffka became in time their most influential spokesman of Gestalt psychology. He applied it to child development, learning, memory and emotion. The name Gestalt, meaning form or configuration, emphasizes that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Gestalt psychology grew as reaction against the traditional atomistic approach to the human being where behaviour was analyzed into constituent elements called sensations. He made an influential distinction between the behavioural and the geographical environments - the perceived world of common sense and the world studied by scientists. |
