Kurt Koffka: Organizing

Kurt Koffka was German psychologist. Explore interesting quotes on organizing.

Kurt Koffka: 24 quotes1 like

“The general aim of my book has been but to point out a way in which a solution of these numerous problems (behavior and development) can be attained. The nature of mental development as it has been revealed to us is not the bringing together of separate elements, but the arousal and perfection of more and more complicated configurations in which both the phenomena of consciousness and the functions of the organism go hand in hand.”

Kurt Koffka. Growth of the Mind. An Introduction to Child Psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924. p. 388 (2013 edition)

“Things look as they do because of the field organization to which the proximal stimulus distribution gives rise. This answer is final and can be so only because it contains the whole problem of organization itself.”

Source: Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935, p. 98

“Why We See Things and Not the Holes Between Them. We can now attempt an answer to the question why we do so. Two of the factors of organization which we have so far discussed seem to me to be the most important causes of this effect. In the first place, the segregation and unification which occurs will separate areas of different degrees of internal articulation, and according to our law, the more highly articulated ones will become figures, the rest fusing together to form the ground. Look at any landscape photograph. You see the shape of the things, the mountains, and trees and buildings, but not of the sky.”

Source: Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935, p. 208-9

“In our theory the total field of excitation is divided into two major sub-systems, each containing numerous sub-systems of its own: the Ego and the environment. And the trace field which is created by the excitation field contains the same dichotomous organization.”

Source: Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935, p. 520-521