Four shrinks on the season finale of The Sopranos.

Dear Glen, Peggy, and Phil,

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When I was training to become an analyst, I had a supervisor with impeccable Viennese credentials who taught me a very important concept. And the fact that he put it in German made it that much more authoritative. At a crucial point in a treatment, he told me, the patient gains "Krankheitseinsicht"--which roughly means "insight into one's illness." At that moment a person really becomes a patient, an ally who has joined you in trying to understand the nature of that "illness."

Until then, people often try to explain their troubles in terms of such factors as ill luck, their stupid boss, their nagging spouse, the capitalist system, an unjust world--in short, on some aspect of external reality. While many of these complaints are often true, it's only after a person has realized that there is something in their inner world that causes them to continuously re-create unhappy situations that therapeutic transformation can begin. The task then for therapist and patient is to understand the psychological template inside of the patient that he or she repeatedly imposes on external reality.

Tony has begun to reach that point with his realization that Livia is the model for his choice of mistresses. Tony even tells Gloria that his mother was just like her: "at the bottom was a black hole." However, just because a therapy--or a stretch of therapy--concentrates on a male patient's relation to his mother doesn't mean it's Oedipal--that is, about his desire to sexually possess his mother. (As De Niro says to his shrink in Analyze This, "What, fuck my mother, have you ever seen my mother?") There is also the man's earlier relation to the Pre-Oedipal Mother, which Peggy alludes to when she talks about Tony's more infantile needs.

Because the Pre-Oedipal infant is so helpless and totally dependent on the mother during this period, one of its major themes is survival. This brings me to my main point. Livia wasn't just a "bad mother" whom Tony couldn't please, but a murderous mother who literally tried to have him killed. And now, with Gloria, Tony finds himself with a suicidal woman whom he almost strangles to death. This murderous aggression is a point none of us has addressed directly, perhaps because it is so hard to contemplate. Of necessity, however, it has to be a central factor in Tony's treatment.

I can understand Peg's impatience with Jennifer's heavy-handed self-righteousness. It often makes me cringe as well. But I have to agree with Glenn that a therapy that has enabled Tony to reach this point--while not picture perfect, to say the least--has certainly been "good enough."

Joel

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