Synopsis: After the vessel they were traveling on is destroyed, an injured Captain Sisko and Gul Dukat find themselves together alone on a planet.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of how the Logos-driven rational conscious ego wants to completely distance itself from the bits of Eros-driven irrational unconscious material which Carl (C. G.) Jung would call the shadow. This in turn reflects how our western culture devalues those traits that are not the norm.
“Waltz” begins on the USS Honshu. Captain Benjamin Sisko is aboard, as is Gul Dukat, who is being taken to stand before a special jury to be charged with war crimes. The Honshu is destroyed, Sisko is badly injured, and when he wakes up, he is in a cave on a planet alone with Dukat. Dukat tells him that the shuttle they used to get there is damaged, but he has brought into the cave an emergency distress beacon. Dukat begins speaking with imaginary figures. He tells one of them that he wants Sisko’s respect and tries to give his version of s his actions on Bajor. Sisko eventually knocks him out from behind and manages to reach the shuttle, which is not damaged. Dukat follows, they fight, Dukat leaves in the shuttle and Sisko is rescued by The Defiant. When he is safe, Sisko describes Dukat as pure evil.
This episode can easily be interpreted as a contest between the “good” Sisko and the “evil” Dukat, especially when Sisko deems Dukat evil at the conclusion, and I would add embodying the idea of the unconscious shadow. That being the case, this episode as an indication of how the rational conscious ego actively tries to suppress the unconscious shadow, which it perceives negatively. However, from a depth psychological perspective, the shadow is not always negative, many positive, or artistic traits are there as well and ignoring these positive aspects of the shadow, which we sometimes repress in order to fit in to society at large, can be just as damaging as suppressing the negative ones. Jung writes: “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 its opposite” (1951/1978, p. 53).
From Dukat’s point of view, he does not view himself as evil, but as a victim, which he justifies in his explanation to Sisko. That Sisko dismisses this can be analogized to how the rational conscious ego suppresses the irrational shadow. This split has led to the dualism in Western culture that has plagued us for millennia.
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)
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