Synopsis: During a holodeck repair the character of Professor Moriarty from one of Lt. Commander Data’s Sherlock Holmes programs reappears and tries to take control of the Enterprise.
In this episode the character of Professor James Moriarty can be interpreted as embodying the Logos-driven rational ego that believes it is all that is real.
Depth psychology, which has been described by Susan Rowland as “a countercultural attempt to heal the splitting that is a characteristic of Western Culture” (2021), is generally described as the field of psychology that studies the unconscious or has the exploration of the unconscious as its defining characteristic. And “Ship in a Bottle” shows us what happens if we fail to acknowledge the existence of the unconscious.
In this episode the holodeck can be seen as an analogy to an individual’s consciousness, with Moriarty at the center of it, while the Enterprise itself can be seen as a vessel that contains an individual’s entire psyche. The holodeck is just one aspect of the greater whole, and when it malfunctions, it believes itself to be the whole of the psyche. For a portion of this episode, Moriarty led Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Lt. Commander Data and Lt. Reginald Barclay to believe that the holodeck was the outside world, but when certain inconsistencies occurred, Data realized that they were but trapped in a holodeck program. Picard, Data, and Barclay are alerted to the outside world much as the conscious ego is alerted to bits of unconscious material in a complex. These three characters are able to integrate their knowledge to escape the ego-like containment on the holodeck. While Moriarty, unaware of anything outside his conscious awareness remains locked in the holodeck image forever.
Reference:
Rowland, S. (2021, November 5). Student-faculty liaison meeting [Zoom meeting]. Pacifica Graduate Institute.
Original post created 11 November 2021
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