Peggy,
Yes, I’m feeling like giving up, but I know that Tony has to come back to Jennifer because we have a fifth season next year. He may or may not be able to work through the negative transference. As you point out, Peggy, he is still under the influence of a powerful internal representation of his mother, the evil magna mater. One way to look at the two dreams is that the women were interchangeable: Gloria morphed into Svetlana; Carmela was in the front seat of his parents’ car, where his mother should have been; the shadowy figure on the staircase was faceless. The blackness of the figure reminded me of when Tony told Gloria she was just like his mother—a “black hole.” One other possible interpretation of the two dreams is that Ralphie is also in the front seat and represents Tony’s father, who Tony killed off. Don’t forget there was an oedipal triangle of Ralphie/Valentina/Tony, so anxieties about having whacked “father” may haunt Tony’s unconscious. Maybe he feels he doesn’t deserve to get better and is undermining his therapy as a way of punishing himself.
Glen
