The First Five Weeks of Season 3 of The Sopranos

This spring, Slate will ask Dr. Melfi's real-life counterparts to examine developments on The Sopranos. Glen O. Gabbard, M.D., is a professor of psychoanalysis at the Menninger Clinic and co-author of Psychiatry and the Cinema. Philip A. Ringstrom, Ph.D., Psy.D., is an analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles and a full-time practitioner. Joel Whitebook, a practicing analyst in New York, is on the faculty of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Margaret Crastnopol, Ph.D., is on the faculty of the Northwest Center for Psychoanalysis and a practicing psychologist/psychoanalyst in Seattle. Click here to comment on Sunday night's episode.

Who are these people?

Dear Glen, Phil, and Joel,

PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...SINGLE PAGE

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

This episode had a visceral effect like classical Greek drama. That rape depiction was extraordinarily, and for the viewer, traumatically true-to-life, both as it was enacted and in its ripple effect on Jennifer, her family, and indirectly, her patient. Also--I had just settled into experiencing Tony as the kind of dyed-in-the-wool sociopath I used to encounter when working in a forensic clinic, when all of a sudden he refound his humanity--in his genuine, tender concern for his therapist's "car accident." (Is this a refinding of his unsullied temperament--a return to the "innocence" he presumably possessed prior to the discovery of his father's brutal side--or is it the humanizing effect of a profoundly impactful and intimate therapeutic relationship?).

The writers are playing with a number of themes here--first, what is aggression, and where does it come from? Is it seemingly inborn (as in some of those gratuitously brutal guys Tony collects), is it a response to a lawless and unjust environment, is it the response to a profound insult to one's sense of self or identity? In the writers' view, it's all of the above! And no one is exempt, not even your therapist. And that's a second theme--we are all "more simply human than otherwise," as one very influential psychoanalyst, Harry Stack Sullivan, put it--in other words, patient and therapist are fundamentally more the same than different underneath, which makes it especially critical that the therapist harness her or his passionate loves and hates to make therapeutic use of them on the patient's behalf. We see this also in Jennifer's thus-far successful struggle to contain her own unleashed thirst for revenge, and the longing she has to capitalize on her powerful patient's love of her to have him exact "an eye for an eye" (well, she would have had other body parts in mind). The third theme that grabs me is that depiction of the combination of an erotic bond between patient and therapist and the power differentials between them--quite a one-two punch. What is the effect when a patient has "real life" abilities, resources, and power that the therapist needs but lacks? Yes, there's the possibility of the therapist becoming "corrupted"--that is, using the patient for his/her own benefit--but short of an out-and-out breech of ethics by the therapist, how does this very common situation affect the therapist's ability to treat the patient effectively? I hope the writers will show the subtleties of this more mundane situation rather than settle for a simplistic if sensationalist "corruption" scenario (that is, Jennifer enlisting Tony in her revenge).

And, don't get me started on what I think of Jennifer's pseudo-treatment with that poor-excuse-for-a-senior-therapist.

Peggy

PRINTE-MAILRECOMMEND...RSS

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

SPONSORED CONTENT