Isaiah Kriegman / Blog /
The Sopranos Says No to Therapy
People tell me all the time that I ought to see a therapist. Not that I need to see one but that everyone does. I used to be very open to the idea but now I just say no. People are incredulous, so I thought I’d write up how The Sopranos gets me. Spoilers ahead, this is for people who have seen it. But if you haven’t and want to read on, the gist is that Tony the mob boss is stressed out and has fainting panic attacks so he starts seeing a shrink.
Ironically, my family is in it deep. Both of my parents work in the field: my father is an evolutionary psychologist with a therapy practice and my mother is a psychiatrist for state health services. My mom also credits psychotherapy with making her the woman she is today. Many of my family members swear by therapy and my brother even made a hit TV show by sticking cameras in a therapist’s office.
You might assume that a show about the main character seeing a therapist has nice things to say about therapy but I think it makes the following good points against it:
It’s just talking
My dad says that talking out loud and being listened to is helpful and that that’s the primary benefit of therapy. Actually, the thing listening doesn’t even need to be a human: we had a rudimentary therapy AI in the 60’s that users became attached to. So therapy is mostly just paying someone to listen. Fair enough, if you like that then I don’t begrudge that. But it makes me feel like a sucker. Tony brings up occasionally with Dr. Melfi that she’s the only one he can really talk to; he unfortunately doesn’t have any actual friends who aren’t liabilities or snakes. Carmela sees this in Paulie’s eyes when he delivers money to her while Tony is in the hospital. She smiles back at him as he’s leaving, thinking that Tony’s associates genuinely care for him. But she only sees a scowl, showing that it’s all just an act to mask their selfish frustration.
Don’t you think it would be better to have real friends who genuinely care for you? I think that would help Tony more than therapy.
It doesn’t work (it’s not supposed to)
I saw an amazing tweet on this recently, it went something like this:
I once talked to a therapist at a party. She told me how much she loved her work and helping patients deal with their issues and trauma. I asked her if she’d ever cured a patient to the point where they no longer needed therapy. She stared back at me like I’d asked the question in another language.
The cynical read of therapists is they just want to make a buck. But I think the more likely explanation is that they want to feel important. It must feel good to be a therapist today with so many people insisting that paying you hundreds an hour to TALK is essential for happiness. (Marxists are conspicuously silent on the class exploitation of bourgeois therapists on depressed young liberals. Emotional laborers of the world, rise up!). Towards the end of the show, Tony tells Dr. Melfi that he’s done and asks what he has to show for all this therapy. It’s a good question.
On the flip side, the patient can also be uninterested in a cure. Tony also called the therapy “masturbatory,” and had obviously used therapy to deal with the trauma of his evil enterprise throughout the show. Other therapists in the show have pointed out the futility of the whole exercise. In a great scene, one therapist tells Carmela bluntly that this is the bed she made. She says of Tony “My priest said I should try and work with him and help him to be a better man.” The therapist cuts through all the phoniness of modern therapy and Carla’s excuse-making at once by simply saying “How’s that going.”
Your problems are (probably) pretty simple
All this therapy that’s designed to not work distracts from the actual solutions to patients’ problems. In that same scene, our therapist also says
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.
The crazy thing about all this therapy is that it all dances around the issues at play.
Tony doesn’t want to have all these panic attacks? Did he try not murdering his friends?
Junior is a spoiled and unmotivated brat? Did his parents try not spoiling him and motivating him with consequences?
Our intrepid aforementioned shrink tells Carmela “He’s cheating on you? Well, do you want to stay with a cheater or do you want to leave?” That’s the only relevant question to be asked, there’s no point to the therapy and he says as much. She
I once started therapy to work on my fear of talking to women after reading some advice that men can benefit from studying their insecurities with a shrink. I sat down and explained to the therapist that I was afraid of talking to women. And as soon as I said that I thought to myself “Why the hell am I in this therapist’s office instead of trying to meet women?” I started talking to girls at bars and parties and never came back. My problems were so obviously out there and not in the office. And, voilà, addressing the problem worked.
Not all therapy is wrong
I don’t know if you need to dismiss therapy like I have. I can see it helping with insurmountable anguish. And if you are like Tony and have resigned to live a life of sin, I suppose that therapy could help to cope with the inevitable subsequent misery. But for most of us who just feel a little aimless in life and have people telling us to see a shrink, consider instead that we’re much better off just cleaning our bedrooms, reconnecting with friends and doing that hard thing that we know that we’ve been putting off. The best therapist in the whole show, the one who told Carmella to wake up, was just calling it like he saw it and refused to take her money. The only thing that could help the Sopranos was brutal truth, and you don’t need a therapist to get that. Just honest, caring people.