Synopsis: An alien with a gift for languages tells Voyager’s crew that he can help them recover a garbled transmission from Starfleet Command.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of how important it can be for the Logos-driven rational conscious ego to listen to bits of Eros-driven irrational unconscious material that appear as intuition.
In “Hope and Fear” while Lt. Thomas Paris and Neelix are at a trading colony, they come across an alien, Arturis, who is a genius with languages. They bring Arturis aboard Voyager and he tells Captain Kathryn Janeway that he can recover the message that Starfleet Command sent from the Alpha Quadrant months ago, but that was damaged in the transmission process. The recovered message gives the coordinates of a Starfleet vessel that is waiting for them. When Voyager arrives, the vessel they find is able to travel using slipstream technology but has no crew aboard. Although the idea that the crew will reach the Alpha Quadrant in three months instead of seventy years is of great hope to Janeway, her intuition tells her something is not right. Because of this, she decides that Voyager needs to be upgraded so that she can travel with the slipstream vessel to the Alpha Quadrant. As it turns out the slipstream vessel is not from Starfleet at all, but belongs to Arturis, who abducts Janeway and Seven of Nine and plans to take them to Borg-ruled space, so that they may be assimilated. This is his vengeance on Janeway for siding with the Borg to eliminate Species 8472, that be believed was his people’s last chance to defeat the Borg. Because Janeway felt something was wrong and had Voyager equipped with new technology, Chakotay and Voyager’s crew are able to rescue Janeway and Seven.
What Janeway was experiencing in this episode, the feeling that something was not quite right with a situation, was intuition. Intuition can be described as bits of information from the unconscious that somehow come to the awareness of the conscious ego. Because Janeway heeded what her intuition was telling her, she was able to avoid a disastrous outcome for herself and her crew. This can be analogized to how when the conscious ego acknowledges bits of material from the unconscious and integrates them into itself, it becomes stronger and the psyche more whole.
mydailysoultrek 