Synopsis: A Starfleet drill instructor comes abord the U.S.S. Cerritos to test the crew.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of how the conscious ego and the unconscious behave in different ways, but ideally find a way to work together.
In “I, Excretus,” a Starfleet drill instructor, Shari yn Yem, comes aboard the U.S.S. Cerritos. She tells the assembled crew that the senior officers and lower deck personnel will switch assignments in the scenarios she will put them through in holopods. The entire crew fails their tests except for Ensign Bradward Boimler, who excels in his. The rest of the crew commiserate over their failures together, and Captain Carol Freeman and Ensign Beckett Mariner believe the real reason for the drills is to bring the crew closer together, by learning about the experiences of the other crewmembers aboard the ship. They come to Yem with their insight and are told by Yem that no, the purpose of the drills was for her to show Starfleet that she is useful and she is going to fail the crew and have them all reassigned. Freeman then orders the crew to take Cerritos to places she knows will frighten Yem, until Yem relents and passes the crew.
In this episode, the understanding that Mariner and Freeman had about how useful it is for the different ranks of the crew to understand what is important to the other crewmembers, can be compared to how when the conscious ego acknowledges and integrates bits of unconscious material into itself, that this makes the ego stronger and the individual psyche more whole. This is one of the core teachings of depth psychology, defined as the branch of psychology that studies the unconscious.
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