Synopsis: The crew of Voyager investigate an explosion that destroyed all organic life on a planet.
If the first two episodes of Star Trek: Voyager can be interpreted as an analogy of Carl (C. G.) Jung’s analytical psychological concept of the union of opposites then this episode, much like the third episode illustrate how this happens. As I wrote in my last two posts, the union of opposites is when bits of material from the Eros-driven irrational unconscious are integrated into the Logos-driven rational conscious ego.
In “Time and Again” Captain Kathryn Janeway, Lt. Tuvok, Lt. Thomas Paris, and Lt. B’Elanna Torres beam down to a planet on which all organic life had just been obliterated. Yet, Paris believes that he saw people from the now dead civilization, and it is discovered that the explosion has also caused subspace fractures in time. Janeway and Paris are then pulled through one of these fractures to a time just before the explosion. It is by being pulled into these fractures in time that Janeway is able to discover the reason for the explosion and prevent it from happening.
These fractures in time can be seen as an analogy of how complexes work in our psyche. Although in common parlance, complexes are generally thought of as negative, just as the fractures in time allowed Paris to perceive living humanoids, complexes are how bits of unconscious material come into the perception of our conscious egos. By acknowledging and integrating these bits of our unconscious into our egos, over time, our egos become stronger and our psyches more whole. This is the goal of analytical psychology.
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