Synopsis: When the Enterprise crew visits a Vulcan monastery they are met by Andorian forces and uncover a secret.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of Archetypal Psychologist James Hillman’s theory of one stage in the relationship between the energy of the Senex, or wise elder, and that of the Puer, or the eternal youth.
In “The Andorian Incident” Enterprise’s crew is curious about a Vulcan monastery on “P’Jem and decide to go visit it. Because, as Sub Commander T’Pol explains, the monks at the monastery have no technology, there is no way to alert them of the crew’s arrival. When Captain Jonathan Archer, T’Pol, and Lt. Charles Tucker (Trip) land on P’Jem, they find that Andorian Imperial Guard forces led by Commander Shran have taken over the monastery and are looking for concealed scanners that have been spying on their nearby territory. The Vulcan monks tell Archer that he has endangered them all because when this has happened before the Vulcans put up no resistance and after the Andorians realize that there is no spying equipment at the monastery they just leave. But with Enterprise ready to come down and rescue Archer, T’Pol, and Trip, the Andorians’ suspicions have been raised. As it turns out, as part of the rescue mission, an underground spying operation is found in the catacombs beneath the monastery. Archer orders T’Pol to scan it and then gives the information to Shran, because although Vulcans are Starfleet allies they have violated their peace treaty with the Andorians.
In this episode, when Archer saw that the Vulcans, his allies, had violated a peace treaty with the Andorians, and decided to punish them by giving the schematics of their technology to their rivals, he was behaving much as the Puer does when the Puer realizes that the Senex does not necessarily play by the rules that the Senex has set down for the Puer. The feeling of righteous indignation and rebellion may be fleeting, but it is necessary if the Puer is ever to come out from under the restrictions of the Senex archetype, to discover the Puer’s own place in the universe. This tension is one reason that Hillman believed that the relationship between any two archetypes in the human psyche could be explained by the innate conflict between the Senex and the Puer.
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