Reading :: Kurt Koffka: An Unwitting Self-Porttrait

Kurt Koffka: An Unwitting Self-Portrait
By Molly Harrower

I picked up this book not because I'm interested in Gestaltists per se, but because Koffka accompanied Luria on his second Uzbek expedition and came away with a very different interpretation. In their discussion of this expedition, Lamdan & Yasnitsky draw on some of Koffka's private correspondence, which is in Ch.6 of this book.

The book is composed of letters Koffka sent to Molly Harrower, his protege, from 1928-1941 (thus an "unwitting" self-portrait, since the letters were not meant for broad consumption). Those who are interested in Koffka as a person, including how he looked up to and felt slighted by Kohler, may want to read the whole thing. I'll just concentrate on Ch.6.

In Ch.6, Koffka has been invited by Luria "to accompany him on an expedition to Uzbekistan in Central Asia." It's early summer, 1932, and "The Uzbek Republic had just come under the Soviet influence, and the government-sponsored expedition hoped to make a psychological assessment of the natives for comparative purposes at some later date, when Soviet influence would presumably be evidenced" (p.143).

After some visa trouble, he reached Moscow in May, writing on May 30 that he lectured to an audience of 300. "Most of whom understood German, but since some did not, Professor Vygotsky [[Russian psychologist, designer of concept formation test]], a most charming man, acted as my interpreter." He added: "I talked for about 5 to 10 minutes, and then he gave the most fluent translation you can imagine. He talked much more fluently than I, and it seemed to me for a much longer time" (p.145).

The next day, he attended a noon reception "at the Uzbekistan legislation [sic]," at which "the Minister of Uzbekistan gave me a long lecture translated by Luria, on the conditions of his country. ... The minister from Turkestan was also present" (p.146).

On 22-23 June, he wrote about the travel: a 20-hour train ride, then a cab ride into the mountains to their hotel. Due to a thunderstorm, the bridges had been washed out and it would take several days to clear the road. "Therefore we decided to make our first experiment in a somewhat more civilized district, a village, Kishlak, a native village some fifteen miles from Fergana" (p.147). The party set out in a bus, which almost immediately had a flat tire, so two parties had to walk a mile and a half to get a new one (p.147).

On 14 July, he reported that they were about to leave Palman, going partway with the presidents of Uzbekistan and Kirghistan (who would spend a few weeks at Shaki Marden) as well as the local president of the GPU (secret police) (p.150).

Unfortunately Koffka had an attack of malaria and could not continue. Luria himself drove Koffka from Shaki Marden back to Fergana in "an Army Ford touring car," but the car broke down and had to be towed, stretching the journey from three hours to seven and a half (p.151).

After struggling with illness, Koffka had to leave. On the journey back, he reported: "The strongest impression I gained from being with these different people in the train was the amazing uniformity of their outlook. It was as though all of them, my colleagues included, had gone through the same school in which they had learned the same lessons, lessons in history, economics, politics, and philosophy." He adds: "The fundamental conviction colored their views on all subjects, and this conviction had all the power, but also all the rigidity of a dogmatic faith. Theirs was the proletarian state bringing the dawn of real culture, while beyond the Soviet border bourgeois civilization was still bending all its efforts, even their science and art, to the profit of capitalism and thereby perverting them" (p.159). "The uniformity of intellectual and emotional outlook is one of the strongest memories I carried away from my six weeks' visit to the Soviet Union. ... What confounded me was that they were all honest and yet uniform. Talking to them was like running against a stone wall. To have built this wall in a relatively short time is perhaps one of the greatest achievements of the Soviet government — however negatively one may value it" (p.160).

Regarding the expedition, he sums it up this way:

I suppose the Moscow government were willing to spend considerable sums of money on this enterprise because they expected formal proof of the beneficial effects of their policy on the intellectual and moral status of their citizens. 

The Uzbeks have still another reason. This emerged on several occasions, in conversations with different men in leading positions, among them the president of the Uzbek Executive Council himself. Under the Czarist regime a commission of psychologists had been sent down from St. Petersburg—so I was told by my various informants—to test the native population with a view to develop an educational system adapted to their intelligence. This commission had reported home that the Uzbeks were of such low intelligence that it would not be worth it to give them any education at all. And now the Uzbeks who were governing the country found themselves in this dilemma; they wanted to introduce their countrymen and women to science, which was to take the place of religion, but science had found that their efforts would be futile. (pp.161-162)

In all, this chapter provides a revealing outsider's look at the famed Uzbek expedition. As Lamdan and Yasnitsky argue, Luria's account did not note the optics of a large convoy showing up in rural Uzbekistan with two presidents and the head of the secret police in tow. Koffka's account gives us a better understanding of the conditions under which Luria's experiments occurred. More, he describes the uniformity of outlook in the young Soviet Union, a uniformity that could and did turn on Luria at the end of the second expedition.

As mentioned, I'm not really focused on the Gestaltists or Koffka per se. If you are, definitely pick up this book. If, like me, you're mainly interested in the insights it can bring to the Vygotsky Circle, stick with Chapter 6.