Synopsis: Voyager’s crew responds to a distress signal from another Starfleet vessel in the Delta Quadrant.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of projection, one way in which the Logos-driven rational conscious ego may become aware of bits of Eros-driven irrational unconscious material.
In “Equinox, Part I” Voyager’s crew is amazed to find another Starfleet vessel, the USS Equinox, in the Delta Quadrant when the respond to a distress signal. When they first spot the ship, Equinox and her crew are under heavy attack from an alien species, and Voyager’s crew extends Voyager’s shields to protect them. Investigating the reason for the attack, The Doctor discovers that Equinox’s crew has been killing a number of the aliens that are attacking the ship and then using something in their remains to create a fuel to get home more quickly. Captain Kathryn Janeway confronts the commander of the Equinox, Captain Rudy Ransom, about being a mass murder and orders him to stop. Instead, the remaining crew of the Equinox take equipment from Voyager and leave her and her crew to fight off the aliens.
In this episode there are several illustrations of projection, which can be described as the rational conscious ego projecting bits of unconscious psychic material onto someone or something outside itself. Here, Janeway and the rest of Voyager’s crew immediately project their deeply need to not be alone in the Delta Quadrant upon the crew of Equinox. They assumed that the crew of Equinox was like them because they were both serving aboard Starfleet vessels. In doing this, they also projected animosity toward the aliens attacking Equinox, because the aliens were attacking their comrades in arms. Similarly, the aliens were projecting the same hatred they felt for Equinox and her crew onto Voyager, because they were aiding their enemy. Also, Equinox’s crew projected their fears onto Voyager’s crew, believing that they would not understand why they did what they did. The actions of Equinox’s crew can be compared to what that crew did to their Emergency Medical Holograph Program, turned off its ethical subroutines, so that it would have no qualms devising a way to extract fuel from aliens that the crew killed. This can be analogized to how the conscious ego will at first project bits of its shadow on another, to protect itself from acknowledging that these same traits are located in the unconscious part of its psyche. But if instead, the shadow was acknowledged and integrated, the ego would become stronger and the psyche more whole.
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