In the treatise, Freud challenges the main authorities of the time by asserting that their manner of understanding aphasias was no longer tenable.

[1] At the turn of the century, neuroscientists had attempted to localize psychological processes in discrete cortical regions—a position which Freud rejected because neuroscience had very little to offer dynamic psychology on the topic.

[3] Freud exposed the major fallacy purported by the classical German school of psychology (including writers such as Meynert, Wernicke, Lichtheim) which had held a "localizationist" stance, namely conflating psychological and physiological concepts, specifically on the subject of aphasias.

Freud continued to write on the subject, though somewhat briefly, in his work The Unconscious, published in 1915, in Appendix C as Words and Things.

[5] However, Freud and other psychoanalysts who conceived of language acquisition as an aspect of pure brain activity typically overlook the interpersonal, social, and systemic elements of language acquisition and word meaning.