Synopsis: A visiting Vulcan Starfleet officer challenges Captain Sisko and his team to a baseball game.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of how a wound creates a complex, which can be seen as an opportunity to expand self-knowledge. The reason being is that a complex is one way in which bits of material from the Eros-driven irrational unconscious can come into the awareness of the Logos-driven rational conscious ego, making it stronger and the psyche more whole.
In “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” Captain Solok, the Vulcan Starfleet officer commanding the T’Kumbra arrives on Deep Space Nine. Ten years earlier, Solok and Captain Benjamin Sisko were at Starfleet Academy when a drunk Sisko challenged Solok to a wrestling match and lost. This led Solok to write numerous papers on the superiority of Vulcans over humans citing Sisko as a prime example of inferiority. Solok challenges Sisko to a game of baseball in a holosuite program and Sisko creates a team from residents on the station. Sisko is very invested in winning the game, and uncharacteristically cuts Rom from the team. When the time comes on game day, Rom is reinstated and makes a key play, although Sisko’s team still loses to the Vulcans. Yet, Sisko and his team celebrate after the game. Solok seeing this tells Sisko he is trying to manufacture a triumph.
In this episode, we learn that Sisko’s obvious dislike of Solok comes from a past experience, where Solok’s actions made Sisko feel inferior. This wound created what Carl (C. G.) Jung would call a feeling-toned complex, because we feel the wound underneath the complex when it is “triggered.” A complex, which in general parlance is often viewed negatively, can also be seen as a way to learn more about oneself, as it gives one’s conscious ego a chance to acknowledge and integrate bits of material from the unconscious. Here, Sisko is obsessed with beating Solok’s team, even though intellectually he knows that not only do Vulcans possess three times the strength of humans, but their team has been practicing together for a long time. However, Sisko reasons that baseball is all about courage, faith, and heart, which he believes his team has more of. Although, in preparing for the big game, Sisko seems to lose his faith in the team which causes the team to lose their love of baseball and Sisko. Especially when Sisko cuts Rom from the roster. On game day, Sisko’s team is losing and Sisko reinstates Rom, who makes an amazing play. Sisko’s team still loses but the team celebrates afterward a game well played. Sisko no longer fears losing to Solok, which Solok the logical Vulcan can not understand. That is because Solok’s rational ego did not learn the lesson that Sisko’s ego did. That if one works through the bits of unconscious material, as messy and painful as that can be, the psyche becomes more whole.
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