Book Excerpt: Sopranos Psychology

ByABC News via logo
September 13, 2002, 1:08 PM

Sept. 16 -- In his new book, The Psychology of the Sopranos: Love, Death, Desire and Betrayal in America's Favorite Gangster Family,Glen Gabbard draws on his experiences as a psychoanalyst, and his Sopranos trivia knowledge, to explore how the show dramatically showcases the psychological conflicts that all humans face.

In the first chapter, Gabbard looks at how the character of Dr. Jennifer Melfi interacts with her patient Tony Soprano, while making comparisons to films that used psychoanalysts to offer a different view of a character. Read the excerpt below.

Chapter One: Bada Being and Nothingness

The door to a psychiatrist's office opens into the waiting room. A 40-something female psychiatrist hobbles out on crutches, and the young female patient looks at the cast on her leg with concern. She follows her doctor into the office and sits across from her. After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, the patient asks her therapist,"Should you really be here?"

The psychiatrist responds, "I feel better when I'm working." The patient pauses for a moment and asks, "You mean, like Dr. Melfi?"

This real-life account of a therapy session reflects how David Chase's spectacularly successful Home Box Office (HBO) series, The Sopranos, has entered into our collective consciousness. Here the patient is referring to Dr. Jennifer Melfi's rapid return to her consulting room after being raped in a parking garage. In another therapy session, a thousand miles away from the first, a female analyst is upbraided by her patient for walking down an isolated stairwell to a parking garage. Her angry patient shouts at her, "That's where Dr. Melfi was raped!"

The Sopranos has received unprecedented praise from media critics. Writing in the Nation, Ellen Willis referred to it as "the richest and most compelling piece of television no, of popular culture that I've encountered in the past twenty years." Television critic Nancy Franklin notes, "There has certainly never been anything like it on TV, and on network TV there never could be anything like it it goes out on a limb that doesn't even exist at the networks." In its third season the show received the highest ratings in HBO's history for a nonsporting event. Perhaps most telling, in 2001, huge numbers of Academy Awards watchers switched over in the middle of the annual event to get their weekly Sunday evening fix of The Sopranos.

Indeed, in towns and cities all over the United States and Europe, there is a "Sopranos effect" on the evening of a new episode. Retail establishments are suddenly deserted. Restaurant patrons make a hasty exit. Social invitations are declined. Answering machines pick up phone calls so not a single word of dialogue is missed.

The human condition involves psychological conflict, the inevitability of strife in intimate relationships, existential loneliness and crises of meaning. These psychological struggles are writ larger than life each week on The Sopranos, and we are drawn to the show because of them. In this book, I explore human psychology as it unfolds in The Sopranos, not only in the context of psychotherapy but in the characters' relationships, behavior and dreams that occur outside the consulting room. The series' writers, clearly serious students of human behavior, have done what Hamlet recommended to a troupe of traveling players visiting Elsinore. They have held a mirror up to nature-human nature, that is, and 11 million viewers can't take their eyes off the reflection.

Psychotherapists have shown a particular interest in The Sopranos. Many of them hooked up to cable or subscribed to HBO solely to see Jennifer Melfi's latest session with mobster Tony Soprano. And the next day over coffee or in the elevator, they critique Melfi's therapeutic strategies, chortle over Tony's malapropisms (Hannibal "Lecture" is one of my favorites), argue vehemently about whether or not Tony is treatable, express their growing distress about Dr. Melfi's crossing her legs when she wears a short skirt; and they debate Tony's diagnosis and micromanage Melfi's medication choices. These informal discussions were formalized in the third season when three other psychoanalysts and I began discussing each episode on the slate.com TV Club. The Slate discussion became popular beyond the wildest expectations of its editors, with hundreds of thousands of readers regularly following our dialogue.

To be sure, we therapists had been waiting a long, long time for a depiction of psychotherapy in the media that even approximates the complexity of real life we see in our offices. From Dr. Dippy's Sanitarium (1906) to Hannibal (2001), we have endured cinematic depictions of therapists that range from the buffoonish to the malevolent with very rare exceptions that approach what a therapist might actually do in practice. We've watched Peter Sellers attempt to seduce his women patients during group therapy in What's New, Pussycat? (1965). We've munched popcorn in darkened theaters while Woody Allen's other protagonists grow increasingly disillusioned with the therapeutic inaction of psychoanalysis. We've chuckled as Richard Dreyfuss unravels to the point of attempting to kill his patient (Bill Murray) in What About Bob? (1991). We've marveled as one beautiful female therapist after another succumbs to the charms of handsome male patients in movies like Spellbound (1945), Knock on Wood (1954), Sex and the Single Girl (1963), The Man Who Loved Women (1983) and Prince of Tides (1991). And, of course, our culinary preferences have been challenged by watching Hannibal Lecter sauté Ray Liotta's brains while making light conversation in the kitchen (although I think poor Hannibal is regarded with excessive harshness by my colleagues, especially since the American Psychiatric Association ethics code does not strictly forbid eating one's patients).

Television psychotherapists have not fared much better. They appear to be far more disturbed than their patients and seldom helpful to those who seek them out. I am aware that Frasier has been lavished with Emmy Awards and that Sidney Freedman helped Hawkeye work through a devastating trauma on M*A*S*H, but for the most part therapists on TV would not lead the average viewer to check the yellow pages for the nearest mental health clinic.

After a disconcerting history of more than four hundred American films featuring outrageous portrayals of mental health professionals at work, we psychotherapists have finally found a therapy process we can take seriously. Not only is the therapy an arguably accurate version of what actually happens in our consulting rooms, but the writers are blessed with an extraordinary psychological sophistication. The themes in Tony's life represented in the therapy are so complicated and compelling that they inspire collegial debate in the hallways of office buildings and at cocktail parties. Lorraine Bracco, who plays Dr. Melfi, and four of the show's five writers have been in psychotherapy themselves, and their experiences give the treatment an "inside" perspective that provides a ring of truth to the sessions between Tony and Dr. Melfi.

Not all mental health professionals are thrilled with the series or with the psychotherapy portrayed. The disagreements have prompted heated exchanges. In Psychiatric News, the official newspaper of the American Psychiatric Association, a reader asserted that he would flunk Dr. Melfi if he were examining her for the board certification exam because she colludes with her patient's antisocial behavior instead of confronting him about it. Another psychiatrist responded with an impassioned defense of Dr. Melfi: "I would dare say that The Sopranos has done more to destigmatize mental illness (through educating the public about such clinical diagnoses as panic disorder and antisocial and borderline personality disorders), reveal to the American public what goes on behind the closed doors of the therapist's office, and help define what a psychiatrist is than any public relations initiative ever promulgated by our own professional guild organization." He goes on to suggest that the American Psychiatric Association should honor the producers and writers. In fact, in December 2001, the American Psychoanalytic Association did present the producers and writers with an award for "the artistic depiction of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy." Lorraine Bracco received an award at the same event for creating "the most credible psychoanalyst ever to appear in the cinema or on television."