Carmela Soprano’s looking for answers because of her tortured relationship with a criminal husband. She winds up in the office of Dr. Krakower, a frosty old Jew seated among decor so heavy he’s got to be a psychoanalyst. Yet he isn’t. No transference here, Krakower has an approach that proves modern and direct. He tells Carmela to take the kids, leave Tony, and turn down his money. No excuses, especially no excuses borrowed from therapy. Because if Krakower’s technique is modern, his moral views aren’t: “Many patients want to be excused for their current predicament because of events that occurred in their childhood. That’s what psychiatry has become in America. Visit any shopping mall or ethnic pride parade and witness the results.”
To which I say… shopping malls and ethnic pride parades? I suppose the doctor means any gathering of the Joe and Jane Schmoes of the world. All right, but going by the malls and parades that I’ve seen, Joe and Jane Schmoe really aren’t so bad. Mobs and riots are one thing, but people gathered en masse for something peaceful tend to be civil enough. No cutting, a minimum of jostling; people do what they can to stay out of everyone else’s face. We could dress better, that’s for sure. If you want to point at a slovenly collapse in everyday life, we’ve got one right there. But I don’t find that public manners have become so dreadful. And why “ethnic pride parade,” as opposed to any parade? Ethnic boosterism attracts some childish people (in my experience), but enough for differences in crowd behavior? One suspects the writers plumped up the sound for effect. All in all, Krakower’s exhibit A strikes me as a dud, and that makes me wonder about the rest of his argument.
The question comes up because the writer Richard Hanania has published a long appraisal of The Sopranos on his Substack. His post highlights Dr. Krakower’s pronouncement (“perhaps the key thesis of the entire show”) as an example of moral truth-telling. Hanania complains of “a culture that coddles people and makes them fragile,” a culture “that has been fully soaked by moral relativism, therapy-speak, and the language of medicine, trauma, and biology replacing that of honor and virtue.” Like Dr. Krakower, Hanania has some trouble with evidence. Are people happier now that therapy’s in charge? “Not according to the data,” Hanania says, and he provides a link to a research paper. But the paper says Americans were happy from 1950 to 2020, at which point a sharp falloff occurred. (The study doesn’t look at causes, but most of us would guess Covid.) These decades began as psychoanalysis spread into general awareness; they continued as more and more types of therapy found their way to more and more people. And during that time the United States was “a reasonably happy country,” at least according to the report that Hanania presents as an indictment.
Along with the spread of therapy, the modern scene also features what Hanania calls “easy access to psychiatric drugs that can reduce anxiety.” Unexpectedly he considers this to be a development “certainly worth celebrating.” If we’re worried about our sources of moral fiber, making yourself strong enough to face the day would seem like one such source. But Hanania gives us no talk of happy pills or crutches—he waves medication along and never tells us why. I don’t claim Hanania himself uses medication and therefore judges it more lightly. But if so, what a Sopranos kind of thing.
Remember that Krakower still practices therapy and charges for it. If he thinks therapy is harmful, he’s a fraud. Therapy done right would seem to be his aim, and on The Sopranos that dooms him to be a walk-on. This isn’t a show about things done right, it’s a show about lives gone wrong. So we see Dr. Melfi, who probably does useful work most of the time, as she encounters a challenge and fails. Like the rest of us she wants to hear Tony Soprano’s story, so she doesn’t confront him in his therapy, she hovers and kibitzes. Hanania says she wants to have sex with Tony; I say that’s part of the bundle. Either way she treats his therapy as an experience for herself, not as a responsibility.
In the end her mood changes. Her friends box her in about Tony’s crimes, she finally does some research (she reads one study!). There’s an all-is-clear moment because Tony ripped a page out of a magazine, and seven years of supposed commitment vanish out the window. Tony, pole-axed by the decision, gropes for new words. “As a doctor,” he says, “I think what you’re doing is immoral.” Well, yes. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, but he’s right: Melfi was feckless. She never leveled with him, never fulfilled her professional duty. She didn’t tell him that his life was wrong and he had to change it—the Krakower approach, but for gangsters that’s the call to make. Melfi’s failure is that she met an extreme case and then pretended it was ordinary. She fooled herself, the way people do, and everything turned to shit.
The Sopranos is about rot in life’s deep stuff, in the things needed for a worthwhile existence. Honesty, self-awareness, self-respect are shown curling up at the edges; we sit by and watch the scenes that result. We see a priest eating all the lasagna in the refrigerator. We see the girl who doesn’t report Christopher’s car wreck because it’s night and she’s on her permit. We see the dean of a military academy trying to waft his cigarette smoke out the window; he’s just been giving AJ a speech about discipline. And we see Melfi conducting her lameass therapy for as long as it suits her and then dropping the client.
We also see a police detective on a mobster’s payroll, a crooked housing initiative run by sellout former activists, and a girlfriend who gives her boyfriend a bullshit lecture (“You talk about these guys like it’s an anthropology class,” etc.) after he sees one of her dad’s thugs stomp a colleague. But police, governments, and girlfriends still seem like worthwhile things. So do the law, accounting, and therapy, even though you can find crap lawyers and accountants and crap therapists. Hanania’s case against therapy culture comes down to finger shadows. A pair of fingers becomes rabbit ears, and moments from The Sopranos become the show’s big message, with the supposed message somehow demonstrating that the supposed problem exists.
Considering what we’ve been up to with our country, something’s definitely gone haywire regarding American behavior. But the chief wrongdoers don’t show a lot of interest in therapy; some other reason has them acting this way. As long as we’re sharing big theories without proof, I’d say Americans spend a lot more time as customers than as therapy patients. We’re trained to feel entitled (with the entitlements sometimes delivered, often not). Shoulder by shoulder at the mall we’ll maintain decent behavior, but not so much when calling customer service. Online we’re catered to by sites that let us squawk like little kings and popes and issue our pronouncements. In the voting booth we think each party’s a hamburger chain hustling to meet our particular needs, needs so personal they’re emotional. MAGA excels here. Vote in such a way that your soul clanks like two brass balls—that’s the unofficial MAGA sales pitch, and by now the base feels entitled to the brass balls experience. Given the right wing’s sprawling infotainment complex, they’re perpetually encouraged to feel entitled and threatened, threatened and entitled. There’s money to be made that way, hence the psyche of a vast part of the electorate has become rotted.
In short, don’t blame therapy for our country’s mess, blame capitalist soul-poisoning. Or maybe don’t blame either, I don’t know. I didn’t major in this, neither did Hanania, nor did David Chase. If a gangster wants therapy, tell him he’s got to go straight. If a study makes a clear point, recognize that’s the point it makes. And if somebody’s a crook, don’t elect him just because he’s an asshole. To quote Dr. Krakower: “One thing you can never say, that you haven’t been told.”