Synopsis: While the Enterprise is being pulled through space by organisms it cannot comprehend, Counselor Troi loses her empathic abilities.
In this episode Counselor Deanna Troi, the half-human half-Betazoid Ship’s Counselor temporarily loses her empathic abilities. The one thing that she believed made her effective at her job. She feels lost and alone, and as Commander William Riker comments on, no longer in control.
There is an interesting depth psychological perspective to this situation, using typology that was introduced Carl (C. G.) Jung and then later continued on in the work of Katheryn Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myer to develop the MBTI. The type functions are thinking, intuition, feeling, and sensation; with each one having both an extroverted and an introverted approach to the world. Extroverts tend to look outward for information and introverts tend to look inward.
What Troi was experiencing, in typological terms is the loss of her superior function, her ability to read other’s thoughts. But in depth psychological terms, this is not the disaster that she feels it is but an opportunity for growth.
Anytime we are using only our superior function, which is the one that we start out with in life and comes most easily to us, we are in danger of becoming one sided. In other words, we can easily lean too much on that skill and not developing the others. While this can make us feel valuable in our careers, it leaves us a bit lopsided psychically.
In “The Loss” we see Troi, who is almost always in control, lose this ability, and how difficult it is for her. Without being able to sense the others around her she feels alone and frightened. But as a tender scene with Riker shows, when she is vulnerable, that is when she is most approachable. She has the rest of the crew of the Enterprise to rely on. At the end of the episode, she learns that the space organisms did not cause her to lose her powers, but simply overwhelmed her psyche with all their feelings. Odd as it may sound, now that she truly knows what loss is, Troi will be a better counselor for it. She will not only be able to read other people’s emotional states, but understand what it feels like to experience them.
Original post created 2 September 2021
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