Synopsis: When a Jem’Hadar infant is abandoned on the station, Odo tries to raise him.
While I have written much in recent posts about James Hillman’s acorn theory, perhaps this episode is the one that is the clearest analogy to it. The acorn theory being the idea that we all have an internal daimon that has all the information that we need to become who we are destined to become inside us, even before birth. Even to the point of the daimon selecting who will raise us.
In “The Abandoned” when Quark buys the wreckage of a ship salvaged from the Gamma Quadrant, he finds among the scraps of metal an incubator with an infant in it. At first, Dr. Julian Bashir cannot even identify the species, but soon it becomes apparent that the child has been genetically engineered for rapid maturation, and he evolves very quickly into a Jem’Hadar soldier. Odo, being of the Founder race, to whom the Jem’Hadar are produced to obey, believes that he can raise him to be something other than a killing machine, knowing only the instinct to fight. Additionally, while the Jem’Hadar is designed to know he is inferior to shapeshifters, he is also programed to recognize everyone other than the Jem’Hadar and the Founders to be inferior. When his instincts cannot be overruled by Odo’s teachings that all are equal on the station and have an equal right to exist, he must be removed, before he kills everyone.
The genetic engineering that went into creating the Jem’Hadar can be analogized to how each of us has an inner daimon, who is informing how we behave in this life, even to the point of choosing who will raise us, in order to allow us to become who we need to be to follow our own individual path in service to the anima mundi. That is one of the teachings of archetypal psychology.
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