Why Psychoanalysis Matters

Tony Soprano is sitting in Dr. Jennifer Melfi’s office and he is not a happy guy. As the don of New Jersey, he can’t really talk about his feelings. And he doesn’t put much stock in this therapy bullshit anyway. But he’s passing out from panic attacks and the medical tests came back negative and his family doctor sent him for a shrink consult. Tony’s office is the Bada Bing, a local strip club. He is so out of his element on Melfi’s turf, he looks like a man about to be garrotted.

“This isn’t going to work,” he says. “I can’t talk about my personal life.”
“What line of work are you in?” asks Melfi.
“Waste management consultant.”
“Any thoughts at all on why you blacked out?”
“I dunno. Stress maybe.”

Tony is filled with dread. He feels like the sad clown, laughing on the outside, crying on the inside. His wife is on his case. His teenage kids are slip-slidin’ away. His mother is giving him grief about going into a retirement home. And she’s a ball-buster, the biggest. “My mother wore my father down to a little nub. He was a squeaking little gerbil when he died.”

“Quite a formidable maternal presence . . . ” observes Melfi.

Work’s no fun anymore, either. He has the feeling that he has come in at the end of things, when the best is over.

“Many Americans, I think, feel that way,” she says. She prescribes antidepressants. “With today’s pharmacology, nobody needs to suffer with feelings of exhaustion and depression.” The drugs will take care of his symptoms, but her real interest resides in what lies beneath.

She probes, he resists. He is a master at evasion, flirting, shutting down. But she presses on. “Anxiety attacks are legitimate psychiatric emergencies,” she explains—not something to be taken lightly. He flips out.

“Let me tell you something. Nowadays everybody’s gotta go to shrinks and counsellors and go on Sally Jesse Raphael and talk about their problems. Whatever happened to Gary Cooper, the strong silent type? . . . Now it’s dysfunction this and dysfunction that. I have a semester and a half of college so I understand Freud. I understand therapy as a concept, but in my world it does not go down. Could I be happier? Yeah.