Dr. Harrower was born in South Africa, the daughter of James Harrower and Ina White, while they were visiting. Her maternal grandfather John Forbes White [1] was one of Scotland's foremost art patrons and critics. Her parents, although originally from Scotland, settled in Cheam near London and she was educated in England.

After graduating in journalism and psychology from the Bedford College of the University of London in 1928, she worked as a Girl Friday for the Cambridge scholar Charles Kay Ogden. She briefly studied dance and painting in France but was persuaded to continue her education on a fellowship at Smith College, Massachusetts with the theorist Kurt Koffka, a founder of Gestalt theory. Working for Koffka, she obtained her Ph.D. in 1934 at a time when Smith had no Ph.D program.

She obtained a post-doctoral fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation for 3 years; 6 months with Kurt Goldstein at the Montefiore Hospital in New York and the balance working with Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute. In the latter position, she worked on the psychological effects of the famous electrical brain stimulation research conducted by Penfield. There, she also began work developing a group Rorschach test. She developed her own set of inkblot cards to administer to groups of Canadian military recruits in World War II. Known as the Harrower Blots, the tests were used to help analyze personality traits through a subject's interpretation of a standard series of inkblot designs. She also refined diagnostic tests to measure tolerance for stress. She followed her first husband, neurosurgeon Theodore Erickson, to Madison, Wisconsin, but the two divorced and she moved to New York and undertook a personal analysis.

In New York in 1945 she opened what she believed to be “the first full-time practice of psychodiagnostics and consulting, later to include psychotherapy”. After 22 years, her private practice ended in 1966 with the illness of her second husband, businessman Mortimer Lahm. During her time in private practice she did diagnostic work-ups of over 1600 patients and developed a method of poetry therapy using poems to show how poets cope with the experiences that clients find disturbing. Dr. Harrower wrote poetry through much of her life and published several books of poetry. She also consulted widely for groups as diverse as the United States Army and Air Force, the U. S. State Department, the Children’s Court of Manhattan, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and the Unitarian-Universalist Church. She helped develop a program of certification for practicing psychologists in the State of New York. Concerned with the effectiveness of her work, she combined her science and practice interests in a major study of the effectiveness of predictors of patient improvement with therapy. Upon the death of her second husband, she moved to Gainesville, Florida in 1967 and served on the University of Florida faculty until the age of 70.