Four shrinks on the season finale of The Sopranos.

Dear Glen, Phil, and Joel,

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I concur with Glen's view of this episode as depicting the culmination of Tony's agonizingly slow therapeutic work with Jennifer. Now, presumably, Tony sees that he's been compulsively repeating a desire to win his mother's love and approval, channeled through his present-day relationships with demanding, infantile, narcissistic mother look-alikes. I would add to this formulation that part of what has made this such a compelling (though misguided) endeavor for Tony is that these women are both like and also extremely different from his mother. Both Irina (the first mistress) and Gloria (the second) lavish Tony with admiration and--this is key--they give him a kind of unconditional sexual gratification that stood in for the maternal nurturance, attention, and devotion that he never actually got from his own mother. So I see his affairs as having had an adaptive aspect that contributed to his need to pursue them.

Jennifer has taken a rather condescending, critical, lecturing tone in her interpretations of Tony's compulsive infidelity--which is understandable, given how morally reprehensible his behavior generally is. But I wonder what would have happened if Jennifer had empathized more fully with other (non-sociopathic) aspects of Tony and provided more recognition of the adaptive as well as destructive features of his behavior. In other words, if she could have connected more fully with his underlying infantile needs, might she have had a more pervasive therapeutic influence on him--or would he simply have defensively scorned her for her (projected) "weakness"? Is Tony the kind of patient who must be scolded and "dominated" for him to change, or is this an anti-therapeutic playing-out in the transference/countertransference relationship of some of the psychic currents (notably, dominance/submission scenarios) that plague Tony internally as well as interpersonally?

Peggy

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