Dear Joel, Glen, and Phil,
Joel, I agree with you that the last episode forces us to face the inexorable nature and psychic impact of Tony’s and Carmela’s life circumstances, some of which were foisted upon them and some of which they themselves constructed. What indeed can psychoanalytic therapy offer two individuals in such an entrenched and entrapping social context? Precious little. Any effort they might make to rectify their neurotic and/or anti-social personality structures will get overwhelming push-back from the Family–not to mention from other parts of their own psyches. However, some of our sense that “psychotherapy can’t help these folks” is due to the writers having written characters that are an unusual blend of intense sociopathy (in a nutshell, lacking a conscience) and neurotic-range guilts, anxieties, and conflicts. (In my experience, individuals that are sociopathic more often don’t want or seek psychotherapy, and people with that range of anxieties and concerns are not sociopathic!) So Tony and Carmela’s seeming inability to gain anything from treatment is as much a byproduct of how they were imagined by their creators as it is a true reflection of the limits of psychoanalysis per se. (Though psychoanalysis definitely has its limits–you have to want to be changed and have to agree enough with the reigning culture that you want to become what society deems to be more constructive, loving, etc.!)
