Synopsis: Voyager’s crew comes across a group of Klingon’s who believe that Lt. Torres’s unborn child is their savior.
This episode is yet another illustration of Carl (C. G.) Jung’s concept of projection. Projection being one way that the Logos-driven rational conscious ego becomes aware of bits of material from the Eros-driven irrational unconscious.
In “Prophecy” Voyager’s crew comes across a group of Klingons that have been traveling for generations in search for the savior that was promised their people in sacred scrolls. When their leader, Captain Kohlar meets Lt. B’Elanna Torres and sees that she is pregnant, he believes that he has discovered the Klingon Kuvah’magh, the savior of his people. So strong is his belief that the Klingons self-destruct their vessel and so that Janeway will have them beamed aboard Voyager, to be close to Torres and her unborn baby. Kohlar then changes his mind about whether the baby is the Kuvah’magh that his people initially set out to find but feels that she may be the Kuvah’magh that his people need. A belief in someone that will allow them to settle a new home and make lives for themselves.
In this episode, when Kohlar first leans of Torres’s unborn child and perceives her as the Kuvah’magh that his people have been searching for, he is projecting their hopes and dreams onto her. And when Kohlar realizes that Torres’s unborn child is likely not the exact entity that his people were looking for, but that the baby can be used to convince his people to settle and get on with their lives, he reinterprets the meaning of her presence to his people in a new way. This can be compared to how the conscious ego first projects bits of its unconscious ideals onto another, yet when that individual is unwilling or unable to receive the projection, sometimes the ego instead reflects the bits of unconscious material back into itself, and in acknowledging and integrating this material, becomes stronger and the psyche more whole. This can be seen as another way that projection works in depth psychological healing. On a larger scale, it could even be a method of cultural psychic healing.
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