Synopsis: Tallinn enters Admiral Picard’s psyche to help him face his greatest inner fears, so that he will regain consciousness.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of how the conscious ego acknowledges and incorporates into itself unconscious material in the form of a complex.
In “Monsters,” in Admiral Jean-Luc Picard’s psyche, several things are going on. He is seeing his father in the guise of a therapist, he recognizes himself as a young boy, and he identifies Tallinn as a friend who can help the younger version of himself confront his fear. These nonlinear paths all lead Picard to a dungeon where he is reliving the time when he was separated from his mother, Yvette Picard, for the last time. Picard tells the therapist that he is stuck. Picard also tells the therapist that his father is a monster for locking up his mother. But being assisted by Tallinn, Picard begins to understand that the monster was the mental illness that afflicted his mother, and that his father was trying to protect him.
In this episode, when Picard relives the events of when his mother was taken from him and realizes how this has impacted all his relationships since that time, this is what allows Picard to both become unstuck from the past and regain consciousness in the present. This can be compared to when the conscious ego acknowledges and incorporates into itself unconscious material in the form of a complex. When this happens a psychic wound can begin to heal, which will make the ego stronger and the psyche more whole.
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