Synopsis: Captain Picard travels between three different time periods in an attempt to save life on Earth.
One way to interpret this, the last episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, is from the analytical psychological perspective as an illustration of the power of the Eros-driven irrational unconscious when it confronts the Logos-driven rational conscious ego. Another way to interpret it would be from a cartographic psychological point of view, that in going back in time, Captain Jean-Luc Picard is reliving a birth experience, here the very birth of life on Earth as we know it.
In “All Good Things . . .” Picard, dressed as if coming out from bed, comes to find Counselor Deanna Troi to tell her about his experiences. How he feels as if he is experiencing something like a dream, or nightmare, except that it is much more real. From an analytical psychological perspective what Picard is describing is active imagination, when an individual is actually engaging with bits of material from the unconscious. That this is occurring is then further amplified by the appearance of Q. Q being a character that holds Trickster or Mercurial energy, Mercury being the messenger god that could travel to the underworld, to Olympus, and to the world of humans; much as how in this episode Picard is moving between three realms, traveling to the future, to the past, and back to the present. It is by combining information from these different times in space that Picard is able to understand what action he needs to take in order to save life as we know it. Which can be analogized to the psyche needing to integrate bits of unconscious material into the conscious ego, so that the ego can be made stronger and the psyche more whole.
Regarding the cartographic perspective, Picard can be seen as experiencing all four of the Basic Perinatal Matrices, or BPMs as outlined by Stanislav Grof in his book Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness. The first state, which Grof described as both that feeling of being at one with the universe and as at the “origins of life and the biochemical world of individual cells” (2000, p. 40), Picard experienced when Q brought him to where life was first forming on Earth over three billion years ago. The second phase, and the feeling of “being sucked into a gigantic whirlpool” (Grof, 2000, p. 41), Picard experienced when he realized that a spacial anomaly was forming. The third stage, which can be analogized to “the world of technology involving enormous energies” (Grof, 2000, p. 46), such as starships, Picard experienced when he was able to combine the power of three different Enterprises in different times to close the anomaly. After which, Picard experiences the actual rebirth, saving life as we know it, and in essence, creating a new post-Star Trek: The Next Generation world.
Reference:
Grof, S. (2000). Psychology of the future: Lessons from modern consciousness. State University of New York Press.
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