Synopsis: The Enterprise investigates the procedures of the Tantalus Penal Colony.
In my recent post about the episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” I wrote about the difference between what Carl (C. G.) Jung would consider a psychological narrative and a visionary one (1950/1978). For the most part, because of the plot of this episode and the characters central to its telling, “Dagger of the Mind” can be considered a psychological narrative.
This is the case because of what is invoked in the location of the action, at the Tantalus Penal Colony on the planet Tantalus V, and the psychiatrists that are at the heart of the story: Dr. Helen Noel, Dr. Tristan Adams, and Dr. Simon van Gelder, as well as the former patient now therapist, Lethe. In addition to the psychological specialization of the guest cast, the names of the characters evoke mythological themes: Tantalus, Helen, Tristan, and Lethe. Tantalus was a son of Zeus who was prisoned for eternity in Tartarus, also the place where the Olympic gods imprisoned the Titans; Helen, reminiscent of Helen of Troy; Tristan, the name of the knight who betrayed King Mark for the love of Isolde; and Lethe, the name of the river of forgetting in Hades – quite appropriate considering that the neural neutralizer device was the instrument for both healing and torture in the Tantalus Penal Colony. Also apropos of a psychiatrist named Tristan, is that Dr. Adams speaks of beauty and love – Psyche and Eros.
But what Jung would have seen as the real visionary aspect of this episode does not happen in the penal colony, but aboard the Enterprise, when Mr. Spock for the first time uses the Vulcan mind meld on a human. Spock describes the process to van Gelder: “Our minds move together. Sharing the same thoughts. What is our name? Who are we?” This is a description of the psychoid in-between place that Jung describes, or the metaxy that James Hillman calls the place of soul-making (1999). In creating this third place, in-between himself and van Gelder, Spock is able to create a vessel as a container for van Gelder’s pain and a place to communicate with him, which I argue is an act of soul-making.
References:
Hillman, J. (1999). The myth of analysis: Three essays in archetypal psychology. Northwestern University Press.
Jung, C. G. (1978). Psychology and literature (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Series Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 15, 2nd ed.). 84-105. Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1950)
Original post created 13 January 2021
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