In Treatment is a show composed almost entirely of the characters’ experiences of otherness. Each of Paul’s patients try, with varying degrees of both effort and success, to explain themselves to him; in this situation, Paul is a sort of abyssal other, always seeking to know more about his patient, never content. In a way, this bottomlessness motivates the patients – particularly Alex – to keep coming back in the hopes that they can finally, fully be known. Thus, through the exploration of the unconscious and repressed parts of themselves, each patient also becomes her own other In Treatment.
Watching Paul and Gina – two therapists – argue about therapy is a moment of extreme revelation. In the couples’ therapy that Paul and Kate undergo with Gina, everything and everyone is on the table – at least for Paul, whose on therapeutic training leads him to openly question the efficacy and ethics of Gina’s methods when he feels mistreated. In fact, in couple’s therapy, it becomes clear that Paul’s position as a therapist is perhaps destroying his marriage to Kate.
Watching In Treatment, we engage in a similar relationship with television. On one level, television seeks to understand us so as to better market itself, which it can only do with the help of effective and accurate psychological information about its viewers. Of course its practice of watching is not live (i.e., it doesn’t know anything about individual viewers), but it is constant, via systems like Nielsen ratings and market surveys. Symmetrically, as it tries to understand us – or, perhaps, asserts its understanding – so do we try to understand it, through both formal practices (criticism, recaps, and so forth) and the simple process of cognition. Watching television is, at its base, a process of deciphering the code of its creation: reading its cues, recognizing its symbols. On the show, this is a reflexive and revelatory process, one that teaches the patient as they teach Paul. In the end, In Treatment helps us to understand ourselves as both viewers and patients of television.
The best metaphor for this encounter is suggested by John Ellis in his book "Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty." Ellis agues that watching television is itself a kind of therapy: "Modern television does not ... provide any overall explanation, nor does it ignore or trivialize, as many have criticized it for doing. Television itself, just like its soap operas, comes to no conclusions." Rather, watching TV is a process of approaching subjects that might be found difficult, interesting or important.
Ellis makes an explicit connection to Freud’s concept of “working through.” For Freud, working through is the process of continually re-treading a trauma or symptom until it becomes a conscious process, and thus one that can be demonstrated to the patient. Freud explains that “… having seen that the patient repeats rather than remembers, and does so under conditions of resistance, we may now ask what it really is that he repeats or acts out. … And we can now see that in emphasizing the compulsion to repeat we have not discovered a new fact, but merely arrived at a more coherent view.” (Freud 37) As surrogate psychiatrists for the patients of In Treatment, we work through our mystifying contact with them, and they work through their contact with Paul, until we both reach coherence.
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While it is less overt than In Treatment, Star Trek (particularly The Next Generation) is also largely about encounters with the other:
The drama of each episode can occur in two spheres: first, within the ship and its crew, and second between the Enterprise (representing humanity) and another entity. In the first sphere, dramatic energy is generated by friction between members of the crew; despite knowing each other extremely well, the bridge crew constantly agrees and disagrees in different configurations. The best example of this is the relationship between Picard and Riker, neither of whom is dependably conservative or bold in his decisions – instead, each episode finds them consulting one another, sometimes agreeing and sometimes not. Similarly, the audience finds itself learning about and watching the development of the cast, as Data progresses asymptotically towards humanity, Wesley Crusher studies to become an ensign, and Riker and Troi periodically confront their romantic inclinations. Intriguingly, these slow transformations have a way of becoming frozen within the show’s continuity, always in progress but never progressing, their narrative potential unlocked only in certain points in certain episodes.
Aside from these everyday experiences of the other, the explicitly-stated mission of the Enterprise is to encounter and attempt “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Each of these encounters requires some process of careful discussion, research, and consideration; each new life form represents a new, challenging other, which Picard (assisted by an able team of soldiers, psychologists, scientists, engineers) must confront. Jeffrey Sconce writes of Seinfeld, "No one watched Seinfeld ... to see what would 'happen' that evening; rather, they tuned into see the four leads enact their typical functions and relationships." (100) The story of the Enterprise’s crew is different - their relationships are dynamic - but their interactions still have a static quality to them. Of course, this is the structure of "real-life" relationships: the drama is that of the everyday encounter with an other, in which something (but not everything) is definitely at stake. TNG provides a model for this drama, and thus instructs its audience in how to negotiate our own, very different universes.
Technology is the basic premise of TNG, which is, after all, set aboard what is basically a giant, talking computer. The crew’s explorations are relentlessly mediated by the use of technology: scanners, engines, weapons, and so forth. More specifically, the use of televisual technology positions the screen (view-screens, visual control panels, windows, etc.) as the primary mode of gathering information. All communication with aliens occurs technologically, preferably with video as wall as audio.
Within the Star Trek universe, several figures disrupt this.
Q is an omnipotent extra-dimensional being who flusters Picard and crew with his ability to flick in and out of existence anywhere and anytime. When Q first appears, he captures the Enterprise by creating a fence around them that is described in the episode as a giant, blank screen; in the clip above, Q openly mocks Picard’s methods (and particularly his reliance on screens) when he appears as a sort of half-ghost, half-image of himself inside the conference room’s screen.
The Borg are a race of highly-adaptable hive-minded cyborgs who function as a unified collective; their members lack self-determination and individuality, and as such, the Borg always refer to themselves as a “we”. When Q flings the Enterprise into contact with the Borg, they at first refuse all visual contact, and then begin to survey the ship by transporting aboard and – what else? – attacking its screens.
Thus in Star Trek: TNG, authentic and rewarding contact with the other can be made almost exclusively through a screen; and as we see with Q and the Borg, the frustration of the impulse to screen foreshadows a hostile encounter. Such a relation to the televisual explicitly authorizes our television to teach us about the others that surround us. In this way, TNG functions in a way best described by Sconce in his article "What If?: Charting Televisions's New Textual Boundaries"; while Sconce writes primarily about narrative innovation in tradition-heavy genres of television, TNG's ability to engage with anything it can imagine (including things as foreign as the Borg and as familiar as mother/son relationships) helps to "allow for an intensity of investment well beyond that of any current virtual reality technology." (110) Like The X-Files, the conjunction of fantasy and reality draws the viewer in, instructing on both analogical and thematic levels.
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The Prisoner takes a much more ambivalent view of technology – and particularly the televisual - than TNG. The motivating force of the show, as revealed at the beginning of each episode by the title sequence, is the search for information; more specifically, by the Village administration’s search for information about Number Two’s resignation. Conversely, much of Six’s time is spent gathering information about the Village – its location, facilities, personnel, and so forth – in order to facilitate his escape.
Intriguingly, the face of the adminstration changes almost every episode with a new Number Two rotating in each time 6 defeats the previous one. In fact, one of the central themes of the show is the conjunction of clearly demarcated good-and-evil with Six’s inability to determine the true allegiances of anyone involved. (The only repeating characters on the series aside from Patrick McGoohan’s Six are a silent midget-butler and the Supervisor. These characters seem to be simultaneously both prisoners and warders, as their actions imply that while they hold some amount of power over the operation of the Village, they are also not there by choice.)
The presence of technology in the Village is limited to surveillance; it is a tool of information-gathering to be used exclusively against the prisoners. By contrast, Six’s investigation is strictly first-person and done mostly on foot. But the efforts of both parties – Six and Two – have much in common: with the respect to their subjects, they are both clandestine, and at the end of the series, neither of them succeeds. In this clip, we begin to see the true psychological similarities between warder and prisoner, with Two juxtaposed against a projected image of the unknowing Six:
Near the end of the series, the ominously absent village administration, beginning to worry about the prospects of converting Six, brings back an earlier Two (Leo McKern) to try a radical new technique, referred to in this clip as “Degree Absolute”. In the beginning of the episode (“Once Upon A Time”), Six is brainwashed and regressed to childhood using a curious combination of pulsating light and music; the pair, along with the butler, are locked in a basement playroom of sorts for a week, during which time Two tries to coax information out of Six by simulating a variety of formative childhood experiences. Throughout the week, the pulsator lamp switches on in moments of delicacy or change in order to better control Six’s impulses.
It’s not much of a theoretical stretch to connect the pulsator lamps used throughout the show to the surveillance cameras. Both are visual media used throughout the show without Six’s knowledge or permission. Their basic impulse is the same: to enable Two to better manipulate Six by allowing him unfettered access to the prisoner. The lamps push Six into conformity, while the cameras inform Two of their progress. But despite this difference, the goal is the same: to bring Six into conformity.
Thus The Prisoner as a series is basically a tangled play of self and other, in which both sides are confronted by something totally alien to them. But this episode is particularly interesting, as it represents a last-ditch effort to technologically sweep aside all of the defenses Six has layered upon himself.
In the end, however, “Degree Absolute” fails; although it weakens the prisoner, Two’s ramshackle combination of psychiatry and mind-control does not break Six, who actually goes on to (apparently) escape in the next episode. In this episode, we witness the failure of technology not to mediate an encounter with the other, but to control it; in fact, the contest between Six and McKern’s Two is the most revealing episode of the entire series, one in which both Six and Two are asked to surrender his psyche to the other. In this way, perhaps “Once Upon A Time” can be thought of not only as the failure of technological control, but also as Six's final, subtle victory, and the (somewhat ambivalent) success of individualism and humanity.
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