Synopsis: Seven of Nine begins to explore her emotions, which leads to unexpected consequences.
This episode is an illustration of how when the Logos-driven rational conscious ego is too one-sided, it cannot assimilate to bits of material from the Eros-driven irrational unconscious into itself.
In “Human Error” Seven of Nine begins to spend a great deal of time in a holodeck program where she explores human emotions through holographic characters. She does this because she is too frightened to do so in real life. As part of her holodeck program, she forms a romantic relationship with Commander Chakotay. Yet when her sexual feelings toward him are about to be expressed, Seven experiences the beginnings of a shutdown of her cortical node. Once in Sick Bay, The Doctor tells Seven that her Borg cortical node was designed to stop her from feeling emotions. The Doctor offers a long and painful process of removing them but Seven declines his offer.
In this episode, Seven’s Borg cortical node that was designed to keep drones from experiencing emotion, can be compared to a conscious ego that has become too one-sided by suppressing bits of material from the unconscious. The long and painful process that The Doctor describes to Seven that it would take to remove the Borg implants from her body can be analogized to the long and sometimes psychically painful process of individuation, the way by which the conscious ego acknowledges and integrates bits of material into itself, to make the ego stronger and the psyche more whole. Seven’s refusal can be seen as a response that anyone experiencing the result of a too one-sided ego may initially make. Yet, eventually, some do decide to, or are compelled to, start this psychic journey. The do so to find their place in the unus mundus, Carl (C. G.) Jung’s term for the unity of the world, in service to the anima mundi, Jung’s term for the soul of the world.
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