Parapraxes, that is to say, everyday errors such as slips of the tongue, forgetting names and misreadings, had a special fascination for Freud, enabling him to extend to normal mental life the discoveries he had first made in connection with neuroses. This book is a comprehensive analysis of such errors and shows a penetrating insight into complex human behaviour, explained in terms readily grasped by the lay mind.

This edition supersedes the Brill translation first published in 1914 and reprinted nineteen times. It was commissioned for the Standard Edition of Freud's works published by the Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. The Brill translation had "modified and substituted some of the author's cases by examples comprehensible to the English-speaking reader." This new version is an exact rendering of the German text, with explanations where linguistic differences occur. It incorporates new material added by Freud to the later German editions and is almost half as long gain as the former English version.