Synopsis: When Seven of Nine has a violent reaction to an alien arms trader, The Doctor tries to interpret her memories to explain it.
This episode can be seen a cautionary tale, about what can happen when the Logos-driven rational unconscious tries to interpret information from the Eros-driven irrational unconscious by its own set of rules instead of letting the unconscious speak for itself.
In “Retrospect” Seven of Nine has an unusually violent reaction to an Etharan weapons dealer, Mr. Kovin, touching her arm to move her aside. Seven becomes further agitated when she is on the diagnostic bed in Sick Bay, to the point of having a panic attack. The Doctor believes that he can discover why Seven acted the way she did by guiding her through a memory regression exercise. In it Seven has visions of Kovin shooting her with a weapon, and once she is unconscious, strapping her to a diagnostic bed and extracting her Borg nanoprobes and inserting them into another individual, in order to assimilate him. The Doctor reports this to the senior staff and Lt. Commander Tuvok tells him that he is taking Seven’s memories as facts. Captain Katheryn Janeway orders that there be an investigation of the allegations. Kovin denies everything. The physical evidence that is found is inconclusive. Kovin, feeling he is not getting a fair hearing, beams off Voyager and onto another vessel and flees. Voyager follows, able only to watch as the ship with Kovin aboard explodes. Seven and The Doctor both feel remorse over the results of the regression process.
In this episode, The Doctor, embodying the conscious ego, believed that he had the skills of a therapist, and that he would be able to interpret Seven’s memories, even though he had to admit that he did not have complete understanding of Seven’s Borg physiology or psychology. The Doctor also did not take into account that the unconscious has its own ways of expressing itself, and that the conscious ego’s first immediate interpretation of what the unconscious may be trying to impart to it, may be mistaken. When The Doctor and Voyager’s crew took immediate action on the initial interpretation of Seven’s visions there was a disastrous result. This is why quite often depth psychologists cannot tell an individual immediately what an image means, and that the best course of action is to let the bit of unconscious material reveal its meaning in its own good time.
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