The psychology of errors

Abstract

One of the lasting contributions to psychology by Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget has been their focus on human errors as keys to the workings of the mind. Freud dedicated two of his first lectures of A general introduction to psychoanalysis (1935) to "The Psychology of Errors". He considered slips of the tongue, misreading and the forgetting of resolutions as related to unconscious mental processes. Hence the expression "a Freudian slip". Similarly Piaget did not follow the developers of intelligence tests who focused on those tasks which most children could solve at progressive ages, but turned his attention instead to those tasks which most children at any given age invariably failed to solve. He based his theory of stages in children's intellectual development on their errors in dealing with problems that required a level of thinking beyond their particular level of development (see e.g. Piaget, 1954).