Synopsis: The crew of the Enterprise investigates a report of a strange vessel in the atmosphere of a planet in a previously unmapped solar system.
In “The Royale” viewers can see the physical manifestation of how the unconscious may try to speak to an individual through dreams and fantasy images. Dreams and fantasy images are a chief concern of depth psychology, which is broadly defined as any psychology that deals with the human unconscious.
In this episode we learn that the inhabitants of the planet Theta VIII recreated this hotel from a novel in order to make Col. Stephen Richey, the lone survivor of an early NASA vessel, comfortable, out of what they perceived as guilt for causing the destruction of his ship and crew. He carried a book with him, The Hotel Royale, and not knowing any better, they assumed that this was what life on Earth was like for him. This is somewhat similar to how our unconscious speaks to us in dreams. It uses images that have meaning to us as a way to communicate.
How Commander William Riker and the rest of the away team first scientifically tries to investigate the hotel, but then use their imagination to feel their way into the plot of the novel in order to exit the hotel, can be seen as echoing the way our conscious ego tries to understand how the unconscious speaks to us through dreams and fantasy images. It is the nature of the Logos-driven rational ego to try to make concrete logical sense of these things, whereas the Eros-driven unconscious is trying to reach us on a much deeper level with symbols that have archetypal power.
Original post created 6 July 2021
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