Synopsis: The Doctor’s hologram program is stolen and sold to the operator of an alien hospital ship.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of how difficult it can be for the Logos-driven rational conscious ego to acknowledge and accept bits of material from the Eros-driven irrational unconscious.
In “Critical Care” an alien trader of dubious repute, Gar, steals The Doctor’s Emergency Medical Hologram (EMH) Program after visiting Voyager. Gar sells the EMH to Chellick, an alien who controls a hospital ship of another race, who have entrusted him with allotting medical care to its people. His method includes assigning each patient a Treatment Coefficient (TC) and allotting care based on that assessment of their value to society. These are not the values that The Doctor holds, and while he does provide care, he also steals medicine to distribute it in a way that he beliefs is more equitable, and even injects Chellick with an illness in order to force him to allow needed supplies to be given to individuals who are dying because they have a low TC. Meanwhile, Voyager’s crew eventually tracks down Gar, locates The Doctor, and takes him back. Once again aboard Voyager, The Doctor tells Seven of Nine about what happened aboard the alien hospital ship and asks her to examine his programming, because he cannot believe what he has done in the name of medicine. To the Doctor’s distress, Seven cannot find any damage to his ethical subroutine.
In this episode, when The Doctor asks Seven to check and then recheck his program, to see if there is a glitch in his ethical subroutine, because he cannot believe that his program would allow his actions, this can be analogized to how one’s conscious ego may feel when it feels that one has gone against one’s belief system. But sometimes the belief system that one is born into may not harmonize with the path that one takes during one’s lifetime. This can be very disturbing, almost as disturbing as being forced to work in a system that one does not believe in, as The Doctor was in this episode. However, Jung wrote: “Psychology does not know what good and evil are in themselves; it knows them only as judgments about relationships. ‘Good’ is what seems suitable, acceptable, or valuable from a certain point of view; evil is its opposite (1951/1978, p. 53). What this means to me is that if we can have more compassion for another’s point of view that differs from our own, we can have more compassion for ourselves when we act against something that we once held to be true but no longer resonates with our core inner beliefs. This compassion will lead to psychic healing.
Reference:
Jung, C. G. (1978). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Series Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 9, pt. 2, 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published in 1951)
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