Published by Suhrkamp in the late 1980s, this book is not primarily a theoretical work like The Drama of the Gifted Child (Das Drama des begabten Kindes). Instead, it combines Miller's own watercolor paintings with autobiographical reflections.

The central thesis is one she developed throughout her life:

Traumatic childhood experiences are often repressed, yet they continue to shape our emotional lives, relationships, creativity, and even our bodily experience.

The quotation on the back cover beautifully summarizes the movement of the book: "It came very timidly... took me by the hand and led me into rooms I had avoided all my life... they were my own rooms... where I had left the child alone."

The "rooms" are psychic spaces of childhood that had remained inaccessible through ordinary memory.