Synopsis: Captain Janeway learns the truth about an ancestor that inspired her.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of one aspect of Carl (C. G.) Jung’s understanding of the collective unconscious. That we carry with us the psychic wounds of our ancestors.
“11:59” starts with Captain Kathryn Janeway talking to Mr. Neelix about an ancestor of hers, Shannon O’Donnell. Janeway tells Neelix that O’Donnell one of the first female astronauts, a driving force behind the building of a Millennium Gate in Portage Creek, Indiana, and that she inspired Janeway to enter Starfleet. Janeway encourages Neelix and then later Seven of Nine to research O’Donnell, and their own ancestors. It is discovered that O’Donnell was not an astronaut, that she trained to be, but did not make the cut, and instead was an engineer. Also, that she was a consultant on the Millennium Gate, but not a driving force behind it. Janeway is disheartened by these findings and the crew throws her a party and creates a new holiday to celebrate ancestors.
In this episode Janeway can be seen as inflated when she aspired to match the triumphs of her ancestors and then deflated when she learns the true history of O’Donnell. This can be seen as mirroring the inflation and deflation that O’Donnell felt in her lifetime. Jung believed that we all carried a bit of our ancestors’ wounds in our psyche, and more recent depth psychologists have continued the work, as well as explored it in a cultural context. Janeway’s feelings can be seen as echoes of those that O’Donnell felt when she didn’t make it as an astronaut, and instead of exploring space explored books with her future husband and consulted on the Millennium Gate. But the psychic wound also created a complex, the outcome of which caused Janeway to join Starfleet, even though she did not consciously know this. This can be seen as an example of how the traumas and joys of our ancestors live within us, even if we do not know it.
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