Synopsis: Voyager’s crew mistakenly identifies an alien life form as a nebula.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of what happens when we privilege the Logos-driven rational conscious ego, and its needs above those of the Eros-driven irrational unconscious and the messages it sends us.
In “The Cloud” there is a direct reference to the work of Carl (C. G.) Jung made by Commander Chakotay when he talks to Captain Kathryn Janeway about the Native American concept of a spirit animal. Chakotay tells Janeway that as a Native American he was “taught that an animal guide accompanies us through life. Basically, it’s what Carl Jung thought he invented when he came up with his ‘active imagination’ technique in 1932, but we’d been doing pretty much the same thing for centuries” (Szollosi et al., 1995). “Active imagination” being one way that the conscious ego can acknowledge bits of material from the unconscious.
As it turns out, this insight into the Eros-driven unconscious is counterbalanced by the actions taken by the Logos-driven crew earlier in the episode, seeing what they perceived as a nebula and deciding to help themselves to omicron particles that could be used for the vessel’s trip home. They did not harbor any thought that when the nebula tried to defend itself from the incursion of the starship that it might be a living being, until there was empirical data that indicated that it was.
This is much how the rational conscious ego perceives the world as being there in service to it, not as something that can be alive or numinous. The numinous is what Jung was trying to connect with in active imagination. Perhaps if Janeway and Chakotay hadn’t been interrupted by Lt. B’Elanna Torres with the news that the nebula was a lifeform, they might have been able to intuit that themselves, as with the help of their animal guides they were trying to actively connect to the unconscious.
Reference:
Szollosi, T. (Writer), Piller, M. (Writer), & Livingston, D. (Director). (1995, February 13). The cloud (Season 1, Episode 6) [TV series episode]. In M. Piller, R. Berman, & J. Taylor (Executive Producers), Star trek: Voyager. Paramount Television.
mydailysoultrek 