Kurt Koffka: An Unwitting Self-Portrait

Kurt Koffka, An Unwitting Self-Portrait, is an unusually intimate biography of one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology. Molly Harrower distills Koffka s "self-portrait from their exchange of 2, 166 letters (some 6, 000 handwritten pages), spanning a particularly lively period in American intellectual history. Begun sporadically in 1930, two years after Harrower joined Koffka in his Smith College Gestalt research laboratory, the letter-writing grew into a continuing dialogue until Koffka s death in 1941. Thus taking on, "unwittingly, the task of his own biographer, Kurt Koffka emerges from the collation as the epitome of a vibrant twentieth-century intellectual and an enormously likable man. Carefully culling passages from his letters to her, Harrower interweaves revelatory bits of hers to him and brings the portrait into relief with her observations on Koffka, his times, his relations with colleagues Wolfgang Kohler and Max Wertheimer, and his special friendship with Harrower herself, first as mentor, then as colleague. The result is an extraordinary montage. Arranging the letter texts into groups with a , prismatic array of viewpoints, Harrower frames them in their historical settings, showing Koffka within the triangle of Gestalt founders; in his multifaceted public role; as Harrower s mentor, colleague, and friend; as private individual; as world traveler, philosopher, and pioneering clinician.