Aliens and Alienists

At the APsaA Winter 2009 National Meeting in January, as part of the APsaA Workshop on Film and Psychoanalysis, Esther Rashkin delivered a fascinating paper entitled “On the Desire to be Human: Androids, Cyborgs, and the Analytic Process in Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Evincing the same sensitivity and erudition that she displays in her new book Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture, Rashkin brought together close reading techniques borrowed from literary and cultural studies with analytic psychosocial interpretations. The paper was an explication of Data's Day, a single episode of the legendary 1990s TV series still in reruns. In order that the audience might follow the intricate close readings elaborated in the paper, the episode was shown at the beginning of the session in its entirety.

Data's Day, as its title suggests, follows the character Data—a technologically advanced android who serves as an officer aboard the Starship Enterprise—throughout one eventful day. As Rashkin suggested but did not make explicit, Data's intense desire to be human, or rather to feel human, mirrors our own desires to establish and maintain meaningful human connections. And while Data's quest is to become more human, part of Rashkin's quest seems to be to use Data's dilemma to help define what it means to be human in the first place. Early in her talk, she recounted the contested history of psychoanalytic theories of development in order to argue that it may be precisely a desire for human contact, rather than, say, a drive for pleasure, that grounds and defines our humanity.

The paper focused extensively on a scene in which Dr. Crusher, the ship's chief medical officer, teaches Data to dance. Rashkin's reading shows the ways in which dancing is an essentially human activity, one whose social and cultural nuances are not as automatically or instrumentally acquired as are its steps. Dancing, in other words, is not easy for an android to master. In order for Data to enter into the dance of human cultural and social life, he needs what D. W. Winnicott famously termed a “good-enough mother.” Data chooses poorly insofar as Dr. Crusher is unable to provide him with the nurturance and guidance that he needs. Because Data appears humanoid—that is, physically, linguistically, and cognitively developed—he serves as an interesting test case, a kind of postmodern corollary to the 18th-century figure of the wild child. Rashkin argued that Data's hybridism makes him closer in definition to a cyborg than an android: He is half human and half machine. Using Winnicott's concept of the false self, Rashkin brilliantly suggested that Data is a liminal figure, on the boundary between authentic human experience and inauthentic automatism. Complicating this already rich reading, Rashkin pointed to Dr. Crusher's inability to respond to Data's need for nurturance and suggested that, at least emotionally, Crusher too might be a cyborg—part authentic and part inauthentic at the same time.

Rashkin's unique melding of science fiction and psychoanalysis not only stirred the audience to ask question after informed question, to which she deftly and thoughtfully responded; it also resulted in a powerful reading that has at least two ethical implications. First, she implies that our desire for human connection and our ability to experience connection that is “good enough” may matter more in some ways than whether or not that desire can ever be completely satisfied. Secondly, she powerfully demonstrates that psychoanalytic traces in culture do not emerge exclusively in the realm of high art. The world of pop culture is also rich terrain for psychoanalytic thinking and deserves to be explored as seriously as Data takes his quest to become more human. We can only hope that Rashkin will continue this line of inquiry and that this fascinating material will be available soon in article or book form. As Captain Picard himself would say, “Make it so, Data. Make it so.”