Entry 5:

Dear Margaret,

Point well taken. The "way in" would have been through the conflict over Jackie, in which all of the contradictions in Tony's life have come back to haunt him. I think that my thesis about Pussy as the "return of the repressed" is true, but, as you say, the conflict is also embodied in Jackie Jr. And not only does the conflict about Jackie Jr. touch the loving part of Tony deeply, but it is also on a more therapeutically manageable scale than Pussy's execution.

I think the writers have done a very clever thing here. We've all been meditating about the conflict between therapy and morality. And in this episode Jennifer--who has also obviously been obsessing over the issue--has the moral question dumped into her lap. But, as you argue, she is so eager to take it up, she misses the actual therapeutic point of entrée and thereby misses the opportunity to move toward it in a way that would have been tolerable for Tony.

Joel