alexander cockburn on dubious shrinks, from The Sopranos to Camp X-Ray |
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Summer's hot breath draws closer and the psychoanalysts of New York and Boston prepare their patients for the difficult two or three weeks of holiday separation. Traditionally, many Boston shrinks take their seaside weeks on Cape Cod, around Truro, sunning and gossiping while their patients muster on their beach towels a few hundred yards away. The touching scene is duplicated further south around the Hamptons on Long Island.
Undoubtedly, beach chat among both analysts and analysands will start with the gallant efforts of Paris Hilton's psychiatrist, Dr Charles Sophy, to engineer what her costly lawyers failed to do, and spring her from jail.
But the prime topic will surely be the end of the Sopranos TV show which, for eight years, courtesy of Lorraine Bracco's Jennifer Melfi (Tony Soprano's analyst), has been the |
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| Psychoanalysts have deplored the ‘breach of ethics’ against Tony Soprano with comical solemnity |
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biggest boost to the shrink business since Lee J Cobb starred in Three Faces of Eve.
Truly comical has been the solemnity with which psychoanalysts across the US have deplored the 'breach of professional ethics' in one of the concluding Sopranos episodes when the identity of Dr Melfi's patient as Mobster Tony was disclosed at a shrinks' dinner party. The rare moments when shrinks aren't seducing their female patients (70 per cent, in an informal New York survey some years ago) are usually consumed by such indiscretions, a tradition stretching all the way back to the notoriety of the patients trotting up the stairs of Bergasse 19, Freud's chambers in Vienna.
It's true that some psychoanalysts were indignant at the way Melfi, chided by her colleagues for enabling a psychopath, promptly dumped the Mafia boss as a patient. "The strict ethical principles established by the American Psychological Association," wrote one APA member furiously, "do not allow for the arbitrary dismissal of a client even if they are sociopathic in nature  |
