Synopsis: While in the Gamma Quadrant Lt. Dax and Dr. Bashir come across a planet where individuals are born with a blight that they all will die of as punishment from the Jem’Hadar for disobedience.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of when one’s Logos-driven rational conscious ego becomes inflated because it identifies with a god-like archetype from the Eros-driven irrational unconscious.
In “The Quickening” while in a runabout in the Gamma Quadrant, Major Kira Nerys, Lt. Jadzia Dax, and Dr. Julian Bashir receive a distress signal from a planet. They go to render aid and Dax and Bashir beam down to the planet. They discover that the Jem’Hadar have infected the entire humanoid population with a virus, the blight. Individuals are born with and then eventually at some point in their lives it becomes acute, with what they call the quickening, when they suffer a painful death. This has been going on for two centuries and has become so bad that one person, Trevean, has created a place where people can go to take poisonous tea that will kill them immediately when the quickening occurs. Bashir believes that he can find a cure for the virus, and he and Dax stay on the planet for a week. Bashir thought he found a cure for the virus, but instead, the virus mutated so that when Bashir inoculated his patients, instead of curing them, it hastened their death because they had come in contact with the scans that his equipment used to examine them. Bashir tells Dax he was arrogant to think he could find a cure in a week. Dax tells him he is arrogant in thinking that if he cannot find a cure in a week then there is no cure. Bashir asks to stay on the planet longer. He is not able to find a cure, but he is able to develop a vaccine that when given to a pregnant woman will spare her child from being born with the blight. Bashir then returns to Deep Space Nine and continues to seek a cure.
In this episode the arrogance that Bashir feels can be analogized to how when the rational conscious ego identifies with the god-like energy of an archetype. However, in this episode, as in life, it is that arrogance that allows us to start the process of individuation, the way in which the ego becomes stronger by integrating bits of unconscious material into it. Without the feeling of inflation, that it was possible to become stronger and more whole, there would be no initiative to begin the process. In the episode the inflation, or feeling of arrogance, is followed by its opposite, the devastating blow that we cannot do everything we imagined possible. But after that realization, Bashir begins his work again, just as we can chose to continue the individuation process, to make our psyches more whole.
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