Synopsis: Lt. Torres becomes pregnant and is forced to face a complex.
This episode illustrates Carl (C. G.) Jung’s concept of a complex. A complex being one way that the Logos-driven rational conscious ego becomes aware of bits of material from the Eros-driven irrational unconscious.
In “Lineage” Lt. B’Elanna Torres learns that she is pregnant. After discovering an abnormality in the fetus, The Doctor performs an operation to treat a curvature of the spine in the baby, something that Torres herself inherited from her maternal line. The Doctor then shows Torres and her husband, Lt. Tom Paris, a projected facsimile of what their baby will look like. Torres is upset when she realizes that their daughter will look as Klingon as she does. Torres becomes obsessed in her attempts to alter her unborn daughter’s DNA so that the child will not look Klingon. Through flashbacks to an episode from Torres’s childhood, we learn that the reason that Torres feels so strongly about her child not looking Klingon is because of the pain she went through as a child and her feeling that the Klingon traits that she and her mother both possessed, caused her father to leave them. Torres eventually reveals this to Paris, and after her fears are addressed she stops trying to alter the DNA of her unborn child.
In this episode, the obsession that Torres feels to protect her unborn daughter from the pain that she went through as a child can be seen as an illustration of how a complex allows bits of unconscious material to come to the attention of the conscious ego. A complex is created by a psychic wounding and one knows one is in the grips of a complex when one feels compelled to act on it, even though it is not something one would normally do. But Jung wrote that complexes were opportunities to learn more about oneself, when, as in this episode, it is faced, as Torres did when she finally told Paris why she was acting the way she was. When a complex is confronted, it no longer goes away, but it can become less powerful in affecting the way an individual perceives the world, or in this case, the galaxy.
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