Synopsis: Lwaxana Troi comes aboard the Enterprise to aid a telepathic race that transfer information by image to communicate with Starfleet officers who speak using words.
Like the previous episode “Phantasms,” this episode is also an illustration of how images from the Eros-driven irrational unconscious when perceived and acknowledged by the Logos-driven rational conscious ego, can be very useful, and in some instances, lifesaving.
In “Dark Page” Counselor Deanna Troi’s mother Lwaxana Troi comes aboard the Enterprise aiding a telepathic race, the Cairn, to communicate with the Starfleet officers aboard the vessel as practice for when they will speak with the Federation ambassadors about becoming part of this governing body. However, what Lwaxana Troi does not anticipate is that the way the Cairn’s communicate does not allow for psychic privacy, and she is forced to expose a trauma that she has kept hidden for decades.
Counselor Troi explains to Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Dr. Beverly Crusher that the Betazoid psyche contains a filtering mechanism called a metaconscious, which is how their race protects their psyches from information that is too difficult to live with. This is similar to how the human conscious ego will try to suppress information in the unconscious.
However, the defenses of Lwaxana Troi’s metaconscious, just like the defenses of our human conscious ego, must sometimes be broken through in order for psychic healing to occur. Just as there is a voice inside Lwaxana Troi’s psyche calling to her daughter to help her, often humans receive messages from their unconscious warning the ego of dangers that befall it. It behooves us to listen for these messages, and when they make themselves known, to pay attention to them.
#startrek, #popularculture, #depthpsychology
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