Synopsis: Lt. Torres has a near-death experience which brings her insight about her relationship with her Klingon heritage.
While this episode is rich in concepts from depth psychology, the overall plotline, similar to that of the last episode, “Survival Instinct,” gives viewers another illustration of how what Carl (C. G.) Jung called a complex allows the Logos-driven rational conscious ego to incorporate bits of material from the Eros-driven irrational unconscious into itself. A complex here, being not only a psychic wound but an opportunity for self-knowledge.
In “Barge of the Dead” Lt. B’Elanna Torres suffers a near death experience, and while she was physically unconscious, she had visions of how her denial of the Klingon heritage that she inherited from her mother was causing grave consequences. When she regains consciousness in Sick Bay, she then wants to act on the information from her vision. Torres wants to recreate the conditions that caused her unconsciousness before so that she may go back and restore her mother’s honor. Torres is told by those on the Barge of the Dead that the only way to honor her mother is to stop denying her Klingon heritage. Torres stops fighting against being half-Klingon, her mother goes to Sto-vo-kor, the Klingon word for heaven, and Torres regains consciousness.
In this episode, Torres’s rejection of her Klingon heritage can be seen as a psychic wound and her continued suppression of it creating what Jung would call a complex. But eventually, bits of material that are suppressed in the unconscious in a complex tend to resurface in a way that can no longer be denied and must be dealt with for an increased awareness of oneself and psychic healing to occur. When in Torres’s vision, which can be analogized to a trip to the unconscious, she finally stops suppressing her Klingon half, healing starts. This is how it can be for anyone who finally stops suppressing bits of material in the unconscious that come to the awareness of the conscious ego through a complex. The healing that results makes the ego stronger and the psyche more whole.
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