Synopsis: Defiant’s crew communicate with a Starfleet officer as they travel to her location to rescue her.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of how the Logos-driven rational conscious ego can never truly know Eros-driven irrational unconscious.
In “The Sound of Her Voice” Defiant picks up a distress signal from Captain Lisa Cusak, the commander of the USS Olympia, who is stranded on a planet with a poisonous atmosphere. Captain Benjamin Sisko orders the Defiant go to rescue her, and for Chief Miles O’Brien create a way to communicate with her. The crew takes turns speaking with Cusak as they head toward the planet. But once they arrive on the planet, they find that Cusak has been dead for three years. O’Brien tells Sisko that likely the barrier around the planet acted as some sort of time vortex, which allowed them to speak to someone from the past.
In this episode, when the landing team that goes to the planet finds Cusak dead, they question how they could have been speaking with someone who already died. And when O’Brien theorizes that the barrier around the planet must have acted like a time vortex, he can be compared to how the conscious ego can rationalize how it knows things from the unconscious. But in reality, analogous to the dead Cusak, the unconscious by definition can never truly be known to the conscious ego. The closest thing to knowing the unconscious is when bits of material from it come into the awareness of the conscious ego, which it can either integrate into itself, or dismiss and suppress – until the next time the bits of material come within the ego’s purview.
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