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.

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Dear Joel,

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I found fascinating the parallel you drew between themes of the "dead mother" and the "dead father" as stylistic extravagances both framing and developing the point about the reasons for men's preoccupation with power. Still, I also felt that there is a missing link in your formulation. I wonder if violence of men toward women over their own helplessness stems from dear old Mom inevitably failing our infantile wish to be spared "nature's indifference and cruelty." After the womb, all bets are off. However irrational and totally inappropriate the accusation may be, is there not the potential for some element of hatred and rage toward Mom stemming from being cast out into an uncertain world, often cruel, and ultimately mortal?

I suppose there's no way for me to talk about this without the risk of sounding mom-bashing (which is 180 degrees out of phase with my desire), but I do believe that in certain, very mentally primitive ways (developmentally early mental constructs), our expectations of mothers are pretty phenomenal, not the least of which is because mothers are in fact pretty phenomenal. We certainly tend to see them as phenomenally good or phenomenally bad. Note that they don't get such a great rap in The Sopranos. Their portrayal is ambivalent at the very least and downright menacing in the case of Tony's deceased mother, Livia. I think the writers are brilliantly tapping into the dark side of our view of motherhood, the burnt crust of our apple pie, if you'll forgive the pun. It may be hard for readers to embrace any of this, making our discussion an easy target for accusations of psycho(analytic)babble. But I think that we can find elements of the primitive longings for the protection and comfort of Mom in a myriad of extreme moments, ones beyond the range of our normal smug defensiveness. The battlefield scenes of dying soldiers crying out for their mommies (Saving Private Ryan, and documented by Steven Ambrose) or flight-recorder tapes of planes going down in which the last words of pilots are to their mommies are just tiny examples of the fact that when we are reduced to our smallest position of helplessness, it is most often to Mommy to whom we cry out, and her absence is never suffered lightly.

If this is where you were venturing, then your comment about the excitement and mania of the death defiance so often featured in male power (think of thrill-seeking behavior, extreme sports, etc., now also found intriguing to many women) seems on point to me. It seems underscored in Jennifer's venom-spewing comment to her shrink regarding her potential power over her rapist, "I could have that asshole squashed like a bug if I wanted!" As you say, there is something appealing about the violence in the show to which women can link themselves as readily as men--especially when hungering for a sense of safety over potential assaults from certain primitive, often anonymously, perpetrated hatreds that arise beyond all apprehension or reason. The fact that female viewership is as strong as if not stronger than that of males says that other women besides Jennifer are attracted to Tony the Rottweiler.

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