Synopsis: Captain Janeway finds romance in a holodeck program
This episode can be seen as an illustration of Carl (C. G.) Jung’s concept of the animus, the idealized inner other male that resides in the Eros-driven irrational unconscious of an individual that identifies as female.
In “Fair Haven” Ensign Tom Paris creates a new holodeck program for the crew’s enjoyment and recreation. He calls it Fair Haven, and it is a recreation of a small idealized Irish town. Captain Kathryn Janeway enters into it one day in order to retrieve her senior officers and comes across one of the characters, a bartender named Michael Sullivan. Even though he does not appear to be an intellectual match for her, Janeway is immediately smitten by the look of him until he introduces her to his wife. Janeway then reprograms Sullivan to be more well read, curious about the world, taller, and single. Janeway returns to Fair Haven and cannot help but to fall in love with him. Commander Chakotay remarks that he has noticed the attraction and Janeway breaks up with Sullivan, realizing that he is not a challenge because anything she doesn’t like about him she can just delete. The Doctor encourages Janeway to continue to see Sullivan, as it would be inappropriate to have romantic feelings for a member of her crew. Janeway decides she may go back, but only after she deletes her ability to change Sullivan from the holodeck program parameters. In this episode, when Janeway changes Sullivan to conform with what she most seeks in a male, she is making him conform to her own inner ideal other, or animus. In real life, when humans recognize another as a potential romantic partner or mate, it is because they are able to perceive the other as someone that they have been searching for, but what they are really projecting upon the desired individual is sometimes an underlived part of themselves. Here, Janeway is able to do real life one better, by programing what she perceives as her ideal mate onto the holographic Sullivan character. But then Janeway realizes that as long as Sullivan can be reprogrammed to suit her needs, he is not her ideal. This is similar to how Jung wrote that the characteristics of the animus may be projected onto another, but the only way to truly love the other individual as themselves is to remove these projections and see them for who they really are.
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