Synopsis: The crew of the U.S.S. Discovery travels to Trill, where Captain Burnham and Cleveland Booker must prove they are worthy of receiving the knowledge of the Progenitors.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of the process that Carl (C. G.) Jung described as the union of opposites—the conscious and the unconscious.
In “Jinaal,” the poem clue from Lyrek leads the crew of the U.S.S. Discovery to Trill. Once the vessel arrives at the planet, a riddle is posed to Captain Michael Burnham that she answers correctly in order to permit an away team to land. On Trill her team is told that the only way to access the information they need from an ancient symbiont host, Jinaal Bix, is for one of them to host his consciousness. Dr. Hugh Culber volunteers for this. Culber and Jinaal Bix are temporarily joined and he leads Burnham and Cleveland (Book) Booker on an adventure through an area populated by an angry alien species, the Itronok, in order for them to prove that they are worthy of receiving the next clue. Burnham and Book do this by empathizing with the Itronok to understand that they are parents protecting their young. They are then deemed worthy and handed the next clue.
In this episode, Burnham and Book are forced to use their intuition and empathy instead of logic to make it safely out of the realm of the Itronok. If they only looked at the situation with the Itronok from an ego-centric, I must achieve this goal and the Itronok must be defeated in order to do so, they might have made it to the point they were told they must go, but they would have lost the opportunity to receive the true knowledge. Instead, Book was able to use his empathic abilities to understand that the Itronok were merely protecting their young, and to communicate that Burnham and he were sorry to have disturbed them and only wanted to leave. This allowed them to return safely and receive the clue. Understanding that the Itronok had a different point of view and honoring it can be compared to when the conscious ego acknowledges and integrates bits of unconscious material into itself in the ongoing process that Jung called the union of opposites. This results in the ego becoming stronger and the psyche more whole.
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