Four shrinks on the season finale of The Sopranos.

Dear Gang,

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Well, I feel like going out on a bit of a limb and stating that Sunday night's episode represented some of the best work Dr. Jennifer Melfi has done yet. Frankly, I saw less scolding, less condescension, less critical lecturing, and less contempt than I have in a long, long time from our dear colleague Dr. Melfi. In fact, if anything, I am inclined to give her major points for attempting a crucial recovery from an entire third season of clinical malfeasance, from double patient-bookings to corrupt couples therapy to downright patient bullying. All of her "crimes" are in fact understandable on the very terms Glen alludes to. That is, what has become known as the "vertical split" in contemporary psychoanalysis, wherein disavowal of one part of oneself allows one to behave in utter contradiction to another part. Think of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as the literary icon of such a split. The entire Soprano family and its crew thrives on such a system of disavowal, lending to their illusion of being upright citizens in the church and in the community while moments later threatening to become downright homicidal ones if necessity dictates. When working with such patients, it is easy for the analyst to find herself mirroring this split behavior. For Jennifer this has over the seasons included taking slugs of Belvedere Vodka before sessions, inappropriately including a patient's spouse to cool off the heat of an intense analysis, "spilling the beans" on another patient (thereby teetering on violations of confidentiality), all while conning herself that she is doing all of this for her patient's good.

We have little data to understand Jennifer's transformation in Sunday night's episode, but something has indeed consolidated for her such that she actually began conducting some pretty good treatment. I was struck by how well she handled being pushed up against the ropes in the face of Tony's pugilistic challenging her about her "weird puss" (her prejudiced facial expressions) whenever she dropped hints about Gloria's pathology. Analysts, who are also "more simply human than otherwise," to quote Harry Stack Sullivan, are not above sweating being caught in their clinical duplicity. It is not easy to be so caught, and in truth only when the analyst is no longer in the throes of her countertransference love-sickness can she regain her sense of equanimity enough to help the anxiously confrontational patient. In fact this scene started to come uncomfortably close to the coffee-table--smashing-incident in the first season when Tony demanded Jennifer "lay her cards on the table" in interpreting his homicidally deranged DSM-IV Borderline Mother.

In their exquisite dance about whether "dark eyes" means "deep" or "complicated" or "what dah fuck" does it really mean, Jennifer finally holds her own. Sure she takes a few deep breaths under the pressure of Tony's bullying. Sure she bobs and weaves on the ropes. But she ultimately never loses her cool. Never becomes defensive. Never bites the bait that all of this is only about her jealousy (even though much of it has been). She thereby preserves the "analytic space for personal discovery" as we analysts are prone to "jargon" to help her patient reflect upon the meaning of his behavior as well as the meaning of his perceptions about Gloria's. Her intervention works, and it does so best of all because it captures what years ago used to be called the optimal transference interpretation. That is when the patient discovers that he is re-enacting an old, archaic relational tie from a past developmental figure (Mama Livia) with a current relationship outside the treatment (Gloria, and formerly Irina), as well as re-enacting this pattern in his transference relationship with his therapist.

As Peggy, Joel, and Glen all variously noted, Tony in part sexualizes all of his female relationships in search of the affirmation and excitement that he hungered for from Mom while simultaneously replicating a disaster in each. Ultimately, as I said, he comes to his own insight about this. In what has to be one of the stellar moments of the entire series, he tells Gloria that he has "known her all of his life," an allusion to the fact that when she doesn't get her way, she becomes Mama Livia in all manner of speech and behavior. That Tony has also connected with a woman for whom he can genuinely hope for a somewhat different relationship, however, is found in his choice of Carmela. In an act that speaks to the seeming resolution of many of her own jealousies, Jennifer underscores this fact, becoming the dramatic bookend to Carmela's Black-Priest-cum-Ph.D.-in-training who underscores the complicated value of Carmela finding worth in her often less-than-Eagle-Scout husband.

Ironically, this episode could be titled Fiftysomething as our favorite Mob couple seems to be coming to terms with their eminent mutually menopausal middle age. Tony is neither a "captain of industry," nor is he a "cry-baby push-over" either. He is more complicated. He is learning to check his homicidal rage at the door, resisting strangling Gloria to death (shades of his thwarted pillow suffocation of Livia at the end of Season 1) as she threatens another "fatal attraction" "serial murder" of their relationship. But he also knows better than any psychiatrist about the kind of confrontation that best contains the rampant Borderline. Tony must have understudied Bogart, who once averred that he "never schaw (such a borderline) dame who wouldn't schtraighten out wit' the threat of a schlap in the face, or a schlug from a .44." Cognizant that he can not put such fear in Gloria himself without enlivening their passionately sick attachment, he wisely sends a dispassionate crony to make the point.

Phil

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