The Psychology of the Sopranos: Should Tony Have Group Therapy?
An Interview with Glen Gabbard, MD
Robert Schulte, LICSW, CGP

Glen Gabbard, MD, Professor of Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine and joint Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, will be the guest speaker at the Conference Opening Plenary Session at the 2003 AGPA Annual Meeting in New Orleans. He will address ‘The Psychology of the Sopranos: Love, Death, Desire, and Betrayal in America’s Favorite Gangster Family,” which is also the title of his most recent book.

Schulte: Would you give us a preview of your talk at the AGPA Annual Meeting?

Gabbard: I intend to focus on the overall psychology of the Sopranos series, with special emphasis on the group themes. I will talk about the psychology behind the Mob and why it has an appeal for men to join it. In a larger sense, I will talk about how the audience has a group psychology that rivets us to the screen every week so we can watch the misadventures of a group of thugs.

Schulte: You, along with 13 million other viewers, are passionate about The Sopranos. What's got us hooked?

Gabbard: In my opinion, the writing is superb—a quantum leap above everything else on television. The characters have a psychological complexity that we rarely see outside the consulting room. The twists and turns in the plot are impossible to predict, and unlike melodrama, the actions of the characters grow out of their psychology rather than serving as convenient plot devices. Americans have always been fascinated with stories about mobsters, from Jimmy Cagney movies in the ‘30s and ‘40s, to the Godfather series, to Goodfellas. Americans have always admired the guy who can get around the constraints of the law and mete out justice according to a clear moral code.

Schulte: Your book is eminently readable—articulate, smart, insightful. How did the idea of a book emerge?

Gabbard: During the third season, the Internet magazine Slate asked me to participate in a discussion group among four analysts each week on Sunday evenings after The Sopranos aired. The Slate dialogue was wildly popular, attracting 700,000 readers every week. A literary agent who read it contacted me and suggested that a book might be equally popular. Up to that point, it had never occurred to me to write such a book. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was a marvelous opportunity to educate the public about what psychoanalytic psychotherapy is and what it is not.

Schulte:You characterize Tony as an "everyman." What does that say about men and our patriarchal society?

Gabbard: The playwright Arthur Miller once said that we don't go to the theatre unless we can see ourselves on the stage. The same thing could be said about a long-running cable television series. If we didn’t find something in Tony that reminds us of ourselves, we wouldn't watch it. There is no doubt that the fact that he is in psychotherapy is enormously helpful in gaining the audience's sympathy for him and identifying with him. We see his sensitive and tormented sides as a result of his visits to Dr. Jennifer Melfi. We also identify with him because he is a man who may be powerful at work but doesn't have a clue as to how to handle his adolescent children. All of the other institutions in The Sopranos—the Church, the FBI, Columbia University, and organized medicine—are all portrayed as corrupt. This context helps us to regard the Mob as just one more corrupt institution. As Tony's neighbor, Dr. Cusamano, stresses, the only difference between the Mob and corporate America is that the Mob kills people. 

In an interview, James Gandolfini, who plays Tony, said that the series is about how we lie to ourselves. In this regard, we can all relate to self-deception and to wanting to present the best face to our children while concealing certain aspects of ourselves that we don't want our children to emulate. The series also portrays a common feeling of men in a patriarchal society, namely that women are actually the real power base, as Livia and Carmela surely are. Men have to give the appearance of power to counteract the powerful symbiotic urge to become a dependent child vis-ŕ-vis powerful women in the family.

Schulte: Dr. Melfi, psychoanalytic psychotherapist to mobster Tony Soprano, has captured the imagination of therapists who are fans. Is she a good advertisement for therapy?

Gabbard: Everything is relative. Compared to the countless female therapists on film and on television who have hopped into bed with their male patients (showing themselves to be both incompetent and unethical), Dr. Melfi is outstanding. She maintains her professionalism in the face of Tony's advances, which is almost unheard of in cinematic and television depictions. However, she is far from perfect. In fact, one of the things that I like about her is that she makes mistakes on a regular basis, yet she always rights herself and gets back on track with the help of her own therapist, Elliot. 

Another unusual feature of The Sopranos is that we see the therapist regularly consulting with her own therapist. Five of the six writers on The Sopranos have been in therapy themselves, as has David Chase. The authenticity of the therapy results from the fact that these writers have an inside grasp of what good therapy is. Lorraine Bracco, who plays Dr. Melfi, has also had successful therapy and uses a psychiatrist consultant to help her ring true in her way of conducting the therapy. Dr. Melfi is what I would call a "good enough" therapist, who has many flaws but manages to do a pretty good job of treatment. In that way, she is like most of us.

Schulte: So, is Tony treatable? What's his ailment? What's his prognosis?

Gabbard: Whether Tony is treatable is highly questionable. Among colleagues who watch The Sopranos, this issue is hotly debated. Some would argue that there are signs of change. When Meadow's girlfriend was molested by the soccer coach, Dr. Melfi helped Tony see that it wasn't necessary for him to order a hit on the coach. Instead, he let the police take care of the problem. 

When Tony is in the midst of a fight with his girlfriend Gloria, he suddenly has a blinding flash of insight and recognizes that he has known Gloria all his life because she is a carbon copy of his mother. 

The other side of the debate is that Dr. Melfi may actually be helping Tony to become a better mobster. He shows no interest in getting out of the Mob and seems primarily interested in symptomatic relief for his panic attacks and his depression. He is also a dangerous individual, and Dr. Melfi is probably taking risks that aren't worth taking to attempt to treat him.

Schulte: What about Tony's mother? Is the father theme in his character defects getting short shrift?

Gabbard: The writers certainly portrayed Livia as the evil magna mater during the first two seasons. She was basically a contemporary version of Medea, who actually wanted her son killed in an act of vengeance. David Chase based the character of Livia on his own mother; in fact, when his wife saw the show, she couldn't believe how similar the character was to her mother-in-law. Chase emphasizes certain differences, however. His mother never actually tried to kill him. She did, however, threaten to poke his eye with a fork when he was a child, just like Livia did with Tony. Livia's character helps the audience maintain sympathy for Tony because he was obviously a child victimized by trauma.

I don't think, though, that the father gets off the hook. In a series of flashbacks, the father is repeatedly shown as a violent man who is the role model for Tony's propensity toward violence. A fair reading of the pathogenesis of Tony's complex personality disorder would be that his has internalized aspects of both his mother and his father.

Schulte: If we can accept the playful premise of a mobster in therapy, can you imagine Tony Soprano being referred for group therapy?

Gabbard: Fuhgeddaboudit! He could never reveal himself in group because he would have to arrange to have all the other group members whacked to avoid having them repeat things he said!

This article was published in the December 2002/January 2003 issue of The Group Circle.