Chapter 9 A Community in the Regression of Thought1

Jasmine comes from Vietnam. We do not know her age for certain. Her parents were killed by soldiers who attacked their village during the Vietnam War. Jasmine was about 2 years old when she was found beside her mother's corpse, although it was not known how long she had been there. As no members of her family were found, Jasmine was adopted by a French couple a short while after. She was good, obedient and did not pose her parents any particular problems – until they found out that she was having learning difficulties at school. When one of us took this little girl into therapy, she was at the age of latency.

This therapy was characterised by the fact that Jasmine was condemned to live in the immediate present: ‘That's what I said’; ‘ It's like that’; ‘What I say is what I say’; she would pronounce and repeat to the analyst in a rough, untiring fashion, preventing him from making any reference to the slightest conflict, to the slightest notion of the past. It was probably a case of a massive counterinvestment protecting her against a serious deficiency. Indeed, although she had some notions of her past, her race, her colour, Jasmine could not believe in it.

The issues at stake at the start of this treatment were very particular: under the effects of the transference, the forced awakening of the past and buried perceptual residues risked compromising Jasmine's identifications with her adoptive parents who were white. In this connection, it is worth noting that Jasmine experienced her own reflection in the mirror as the resurgence of a ghost, which was a real torture for her. Contrariwise, in her drawings, she was eagerly searching for impressions through the effects of the colours she chose with passionate interest.

It was against a vast background of interpretative silence and on the basis of these beginnings of pictorial images that a rich work of figurability, shared with

the analyst, culminated progressively in the emergence of the image of the natal villa