Through poetry, journal writing and epistle, the author employs her biographical study of Dr Edith Buxbaum (1902-1982), Viennese-born, Seattle psychoanalyst and disciple of Freud, to explore her own childhood grief, failures, and guilt. She juxtaposes her experiences, as a Jewish girl growing up in Baltimore, Maryland, with the Freudian basis of one of Buxbaum's clinical case studies on the latency period. While the author appreciates psychoanalytic theory, she questions Buxbaum's contention that Latency period (approximately aged 6-10) is anything but quiet.