Synopsis: Lwaxana Troi, Counselor Troi’s mother, comes aboard the Enterprise to be married and befriends Lt. Worf’s son.
In an early scene of this episode Lt. Worf and his son, Alexander Rozhenko, are meeting with Counselor Deanna Troi, trying to resolve some of their issues. Counselor Troi advises a rational way of proceeding in working things out and then is informed that her mother, Lwaxana Troi has come aboard the Enterprise. Soon thereafter, Troi goes to meet her mother, who tells her she has come on the ship to be married. As they are taking, Worf and his son suddenly appear and barge into their conversation. Lwaxana Troi then proceeds to unravel all the rational conflict resolution that Counselor Troi has been advising.
These scenes illustrate what happens when bits of irrational unconscious energy often described as feminine, and here embodied in the character of Lwaxana Troi, invade the psychic territory that the rational conscious ego perceives as its own. In many ways throughout this series, the character of Lwaxana Troi has come to represent all that is feminine in our psyches.
There are many symbolic associations with Lwaxana as being the embodiment of feminine energy: she is Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx, Heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed, she is here drawn to mud baths, which combines water and earth – both elements of Mother Earth, she is a mother figure, she continually teases the rigid Captain Jean-Luc Picard, until she finds another even more opposite energy in her intended fiancé Minister Campio. She is flamboyant. She states her mind exactly as she sees it, she is telepathic, and she wears whatever suits her mood. Many of her scenes have her behaving in what Picard would consider a completely irrational manner. If Picard as captain is identifying with being the rational ego of the Enterprise, no wonder he avoids her.
Yet, in “Cost of Living” Lwaxana Troi has a teaching moment with Worf’s son. What she tells him is the secret of life, is also a very accurate description of archetypal psychology, as practiced by James Hillman. Lwaxana Troi states: “Every one of us has a thousand different kinds of little people inside of us, and some of them want to get out and be wild and some want to be sad or happy or inventive or even just go dancing. That’s why we all have so many different urges at different times. And all those different little people inside of us? We must never be afraid to take them with us wherever we go. I mean, who knows when we may need one of them to pop up and rescue us from ourselves . . . the great secret is not the variety of life it’s the variety of us.”
This episode is a whimsical reminder of how important it is to accept all elements of our psyches, conscious and unconscious, rational and irrational, and masculine and feminine energies, in order to become more whole.
Original post created 16 October 2021
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