Synopsis: When Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock deliver a drug to a Federation asylum for the criminally insane, they are taken prisoner by the inmates.
Although “Whom Gods Destroy” is widely considered as a reductive “reimaging” of the prior episode “Dagger of the Mind,” from a depth and archetypal psychology perspective, as the title indicates, there are several interesting mythic threads running through it.
The first is the idea that with the drug that Captain James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock are delivering, that the “Federation hopes to eliminate mental illness for all time.” Really? From a depth psychological perspective, some of what our society calls mental illness is in fact a visit from the gods, a message that something in our lives is out of balance. As Carl (C. G.) Jung would say: “the gods have become symptoms”. Symptoms that our culture too often chooses to ignore or suppress, instead of acknowledging and honoring them.
Also, it is interesting that the leader of the inmates, the former Starship Fleet Captain, Garth of Izar, is a shapeshifter. This is interesting because in ancient mythology, the Greek Hermes, identified by the Romans as Mercury, is “the god of psychoanalysis.” Do we really want to lose sight of his gifts? Hermes is also the god of communication, commerce, and yes deception; but to ignore or try to suppress him would inflect great damage on ourselves. This may not agree with behavioral or cognitive psychologies, those mainstream positivistic practices want an individual to conform to societal norms so that they can function in it; but this deep look into the soul, or soul-making as James Hillman called it, may be what can save our world.
Finally, “Whom Gods Destroy” also elucidates the concept of inflation and the danger of identifying too much and too long with a specific god. Because when Garth started perceiving himself a god, his fate was sealed. Like Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, Garth’s downfall was just as deep as his soaring was high. Garth ends the episode having been given the drug, and a shell of his former self. The memory of his grandeur removed. Hermes had left the building.
Original post created 23 March 2021
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