SHRINKS SING FOR SOPRANOS Yale
SHRINKS SING FOR SOPRANOS
Yale Kramer
Tonight the fourth season of the highly successful series "The Sopranos" will start and keep viewers glued to screens everywhere for another season. And for good reason: it has all the ingredients that would make a TV series compelling and successful. It has good actors, suspense, characters in conflict with each other, an occasional clever line or two. What more could one ask of an hour's entertainment on a Sunday night? But hey, it's only a TV show. It doesn't illuminate life, touch you to the core, it doesn't move you to tears or rueful laughter, it doesn't help you live or die, as great art or even good art does. And the people making the series are not pretentious enough to think that it would. They're only in it for the big money it pays if they deliver an hour's worth of good entertainment a week. That's fine, nothing wrong with that, it's life. The program is there so that folks can forget about their sick kid for an hour, or the lousy boss they have to say good morning to on Monday, or the irritating husband they have to go to bed with a little later.
So you can imagine how astonished I was to pick up my New York Times Book Review and find five serious books about "The Sopranos" being reviewed. They were written by apparently serious people wanting to be taken seriously. Furthermore, at the top of the list, and this is painful to admit, was a book written by one of my own psychoanalytic colleagues, Dr. Glen O.Gabbard, identified by the reviewer as a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine. I won't comment on Dr. Gabbard's opus entitled The Psychology of "The Sopranos": Love, Death, Desire and Betrayal in America's Favorite Gangster Family, not having read it, and because the gifted reviewer of all of these pretentious books treats them with the tongue-in-cheek contempt they deserve. But it unfortunately revived a long repressed memory of an event which occurred last December at the semi-annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. I was not present at the event itself but read about it in The New York Times the following morning.
“So pathetic,” I heard myself mumble at breakfast, “We’re so pathetic, it's embarrassing. So narcissistic, so self-deluded, just like our patients. Worse,” I thought. I had just started to read Sarah Boxer’s article, “Therapists Go Crazy for Tony Soprano’s Therapist”.
The warmth of my morning toast was ebbing away as I read with astonishment that in a room filled with hundreds of my colleagues an award was being given to the actress Lorraine Bracco and the writers of "The Sopranos” for their creation of the therapist/character Dr. Jennifer Melfi. With growing disbelief I learned from Ms. Boxer that many of my colleagues had “developed dangerously warm feelings, tinged with envy, gratitude, pride, confusion and plain old star-struckness, for Jennifer Melfi…”
“Right on!” I thought as I read Ms. Bracco’s response when she heard she was going to get a award from the American Psychoanalytic Association, “What, are they crazy?”
I had seen a few episodes during the first and second year of its run and was impressed only by skin-deep, stereotypical characters who had no motivations except plot-driven ones. Drama didn’t, it seemed to me, emerge out of character, rather it was the need for suspense and continuity that was making people behave the way they did--as you would expect in a TV serial. Nor was I impressed with Dr. Melfi as a psychotherapist--nothing against Lorraine Bracco, who did as well as she could with the material. Everything about her “professional” role was a cliché. The obligatory “How did you feel about that?”; the deadpan facial expression; the “interventions”--meant to mimic transference interpretations, or psychogenetic interpretations--were of the cheapest, most predictable kind. How could it have been otherwise, since there was no real patient that was being depicted, and it was a stage set, not a consulting room. How could my colleagues, grown-up men and women, with professional training, have been seduced by this nonsense, I wondered.
The reassuring words of Charles Mackay came to mind. MacKay, the author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written in the 19th century, tells us “Men.... think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
Perhaps it was that, or the powerful conscious and unconscious seduction that surrounds celebrity. It happens more often than it should that when analysts are consulted by world-famous people--movie stars, politicians, media stars, novelists, playwrights--these analysts sometimes lose their professional perspective and allow their trained skills and instincts to become confused and deformed. In a sense they go a little ga-ga--“star-struckness” as Ms. Boxer puts it--and their professional perspective and values melt away.
It wasn’t until the following morning that I understood the appalling truth. It was then that I received an e-mail message sent to all members of the American Psychoanalytic Association early that morning from Dr. Kerry J. Sulkowicz in his role as Chairman of the Committee on Public Information of the Association. Among other things he told the members triumphantly that to get Ms. Boxer to write her article about the APA giving "Dr. Melfi" an award--not for being a good actress but for being a good analyst--was "...a wonderful coup...."
“A wonderful coup….” Let’s pull the curtain of charity over this unfortunate mis-diagnosis. I can only attribute Dr. Sulkowicz’s misunderstanding of Sarah Boxer’s coverage of the event to his youth and inexperience and a deep desire to be loved by the media. The whole event--the award ceremony/love-fest, Boxer’s article, the celebration of Boxer’s charming book poking fun at Freud, psychoanalysis, and possibly her own analyst, past or current--was a mutual seduction and betrayal.
The young analysts of the 21st century march to a different drummer than the humorless, sedate old fogies of the past. They are “proactive” I think the word is today: energetic, hungry for patients, market oriented, media-aware, familiar with spin-control, hype and the importance of getting the limelight.
The new leaders of psychoanalysis appear to be desperate for the glittering prizes of fame and glory and they see their path to these through the gatekeepers of popular culture--the media. The strategy is to get the press to love us at, apparently, any cost. We will have to prove to them, Dr. Sulkowicz informs us, that we are “modern, relevant to contemporary society, and having a sense of humor about ourselves…” What this appears to boil down to is proving that we're ordinary guys who can admit that we have foibles and immaturities. See, we love TV like everyone else. We don’t just sit around reading Goethe and listening to unaccompanied Bach partitas. See, we envy Dr. Melfi--we’d like to have exciting patients too, we’d like to be on TV, we’d like to be in the limelight too, because we’re unhappy with our dull, uneventful lot in life just like everybody else.
So the mutual seduction goes something like this: Love us. We’ll do just about anything to get you to love us and give us a little space in your “Arts and Ideas” section. Spell our name right and we’ll give you quotes on anything, stories about whatever you want, we’ll even debase ourselves--just love us. In the bargain we’ll massage your ego by taking your new book seriously even though it makes fun of us.
The trouble is that Dr. Sulkowicz was out of his depth. He didn't realize that he had been had. Analysts, when they find themselves in the real world, are often naively trusting. Dr. Sulkowicz thought he had had "a wonderful coup" when in fact "Sarah" had walked away with his pants.
In the most charmingly naughty way Ms. Boxer had written an article about us that makes us look like adolescent jerks--starstruck, confused grownups who can’t distinguish reality from fantasy in real life let alone the consulting room. And she had done it without using a single mean word.
Perhaps tonight as we start watching this year's installments of "The Sopranos" we can begin to forget this embarrassing psychic trauma.
