This book is not a treatise on psychoanalytic technique nor does it include clinical cases; however, everything proposed in it is based on the clinical experience of Françoise Dolto.

Parents, some of whom have dissolved their marital lives - sometimes many successive marital lives - were able to analyze with her the return of repressed experiences from their childhood, which they had linked to the separation of their own parents and the silence that had been imposed.

For this reason, the book was written for both parents and their children. It takes the form of an extended interview; part of it indeed concerns those who manage the processes anticipated by the law, as professionals within the institution but also outside of it.

It is, in a way, the book of a citizen, a psychoanalyst by profession, who is known to deal with the prevention of difficulties arising from the unconscious pains of children; pains that are always articulated in the unspoken or in a silent falsehood, which are maintained "for the good" of the children.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]