Synopsis: The Enterprise and a Klingon ship are provoked by an alien entity to fight one another.
“Day of the Dove” is one of those episodes that is difficult for me to watch. And I think it is because it speaks to the idea that an unknown entity can release emotions that our society considers negative while exposing to the world that we indeed do have these traits within ourselves – an unpleasant thought.
This episode, and my reaction to it, illustrate how the conscious ego can go to great lengths to suppress that which it does not want to acknowledge. Not that we are physically confronted by an “evil” duplicate, as Captain James T. Kirk was in “The Enemy Within,” but it is there, and part of the process of becoming more whole, what Carl (C. G.) Jung calls individuation, is to acknowledge that we do indeed have these aspects within ourselves, and to try to integrate them into our conscious ego, to add depth to our psyches.
Jung wrote: “Psychology does not know what good and evil are in themselves; it knows them only as judgments about relationships. ‘Good’ is what seems suitable, acceptable, or valuable from a certain point of view; evil is the opposite” (1951/1978, p. 53).
In this episode an alien entity, made up of pure energy, feeds on hatred. Not only that, the entity is “capable of manipulating matter and mind” to stoke that hatred. The Starfleet officers aboard the Enterprise seem more surprised by their reactions then the Klingons, as the Klingon Captain Kang acknowledges that they need no help in hating humans. It is also interesting that earlier in the episode Kang admits that Klingons do not believe in a devil. This would be in line with Jung’s concept quoted above. However, while the Klingons are much more in touch with their feelings, the Enterprise crew, because their emotions are so repressed, notice the difference more clearly. When even the rational Logos-driven Mr. Spock – who is half-human – feels the unpleasant taste of racial hatred, he realizes how strong the alien really is. Spock then deduces that in order to defeat the entity that all hostile thoughts must be stopped. While this could be seen as further suppression of the emotions; another interpretation is that it mirrors what happens when the conscious ego stops denouncing the emotions contained in the psyche which society considers unsuitable, and instead acknowledges them, and begins the process of integrating these traits into our persona, to redirect their harmful effects, to become more whole.
Reference:
Jung, C. G. (1978). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Series Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 9, pt. 2, 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published in 1951)
Original post created 15 March 2021
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