Was Melfi A Good Therapist?

Of all the Soprano characters, Dr. Jennifer Melfi is the most unique. Melfi is Tony’s psychiatrist throughout the six seasons of the show. Through their weekly session, we not only get a look into Tony’s psyche and the trauma that makes him who he is, but also get some of the best scenes in the series.

While all the other characters on the show are connected to Tony through his family or his criminal life, Melfi is unique in that she has no part of that world. Her relationship to Tony is professional, she is his doctor and he is her patient. She maintains a respectful distance so that she never loses her objectivity in treating Tony.

Or does she?

Throughout the show, we see Melfi cross ethical boundaries many times. Sometimes this is forced on her by the fact that she is treating a mobster. Other times her own personal feelings for Tony get in the way of treating him. And the way their relationship comes to an end leaves many people wondering, was she even a good therapist at all?

So let’s take a look at Dr. Melfi as a character and see how good of a therapist she really was.

We’re first introduced to Melfi in the very first scene of the pilot episode. Tony is sent by his family doctor to Melfi after he collapses during a bbq. With no physical symptoms, his doctor thinks it might have been a panic attack, and sends him to the psychiatrist to see if she can help him.

Tony, being an old school mafioso, finds it difficult to open up to a shrink, let alone a woman.

“Look, it’s impossible for me to talk to a psychiatrist.”

-Tony Soprano

He’s deeply embarrassed by his panic attacks, thinking that it makes him weak. He also fears that if any of his associates ever found out he was in therapy, they might think he was revealing secrets and have him killed.

Over the course of the first season, he begins to open up to her about the things that bother him in his life. They built a rapport, and slowly start to get at the heart of his problems: namely his toxic relationship with his mother Livia.

However this is cut short when Junior discovers that Tony is seeing a shrink. This among other conflicts between the two leads Junior to arranging a hit against Tony. The hit fails, but worried that Junior might go after her, Tony tells Melfi she needs to leave town.

Melfi is obviously distressed that she is now in danger because of Tony. While hiding out, one of her patients commits suicide because she isn’t able to be reached. When the conflict ends, Tony approaches her about starting therapy again. However Melfi now wants nothing to do with Tony.

“Get out of my life!”

- Dr. Jennifer Melfi

Tony tries to go on without therapy, but finds that he needs someone to talk to about his problems. He tries to talk to people like Hesh, but most of the time they just end up bored by his constant complaining.

Meanwhile Melfi starts to feel guilty about abandoning Tony. She worries that without therapy, Tony’s panic attacks might get him killed. She invites him back, and they continue their sessions.

Slowly however, Melfi begins to be changed by her time with Tony. She becomes more aggressive and confrontational, just like him. She also begins drinking vodka before their sessions, as she is terrified of what he might tell her he has done.

However, despite her repulsion, she cannot bring herself to end the therapy. Though Tony tries to quit many times of his own accord, she keeps him around. Her own therapist Elliot worries that she is becoming too attached to Tony, and is getting a vicarious thrill out of treating him. He warns that the therapy is supposed to be for him, not for her.

“I think seeing him again will be very therapeutic for me.”

“It’s not supposed to be therapeutic for you.”

- Melfi & Elliot

Their relationship is pushed to the limit in the episode “Employee of the Month”. While walking to her car late at night, Melfi is attacked and raped in the parking garage. The man is caught, but due to a technicality is let go by the police.

Melfi is enraged by the lack of justice, and thinks about telling Tony who would of course have the guy killed. During one of their sessions, she breaks down in front of Tony and almost tells him the truth. However she stops herself at the last minute, realizing that telling him would compromise their professional relationship, and leave her indebted to him.

Their therapy continues through the final season. However in the penultimate episode, Melfi learns about a psychological study that says sociopaths cannot be helped from talk therapy, and instead actually use it to practice their emotions and become better liars.

Melfi is at first angered by the suggestion that her work for the past seven years has been for nothing. However after reading the study, she comes to believe Tony cannot change as well. The final straw is when he tears a page out of one of her magazines without asking. Realizing that Tony is still the same selfish criminal he was when they started their sessions, she ends their relationship.

The last time we see her, she closes the door on Tony, the exact opposite of the first shot we saw her in back in the pilot.

Many fans were upset at the lack of resolution in their story. For six seasons, we had watched Tony and Melfi interact in therapy. Through their sessions, we learned not only about Tony as a character, but also Melfi. We got to know her family, her traumas, and her growth as a character in her own right. And to see that all end so abruptly, seemed out of place.

The idea of the study and Melfi dropping Tony came out of a psychological conference that David Chase attended. Chase asked one of the psychologists there what she thought of the therapy on the show, and the psychologist responded that it was only enabling Tony to be a better criminal. Chase then decided that Melfi would drop Tony as a patient at the end of the series.

Lorraine Bracco, the actress that played Carmela, recently revealed on Talking Sopranos that she was unhappy with the way their story ended. She felt that Melfi cared about Tony, and wished the ending of their relationship would have been more meaningful. 

However Chase believed that this was a more realistic depiction of therapy than he had ever seen. He insisted that therapy has a few moments of progress, but is mostly an endless process that eventually ends when one party has had enough. Chase himself went through therapy, and the character of Melfi was actually based on his therapist and his experiences with her.

Knowing this, it’s interesting to look at Melfi and think about what Chase was trying to say about therapy in general. It’s clear he is both fascinated with therapy, and deeply critical of it, and many of Tony’s thoughts about therapy might well be Chase’s.

“Sometimes what happens in here is like taking a shit.”

-Tony

It’s also clear from the show that Tony is not a better person than when the series started. In fact, he’s only gotten worse as the series went on. And if Tony hasn’t changed, what does that say about Melfi as a therapist?

Well before we rush to judgment about Melfi, let’s examine what her impact really was. The reason Tony begins therapy in the first place is because of his panic attacks. Over the course of the series, the rate at which he has panic attacks decreases, and his last one occurs in Season 5. In fact he has no panic attack in the last season of the show.

If we look at just this, Melfi has done her job. Tony said he wanted to stop having the attacks, and Melfi was able to help him get there by addressing the root cause of his condition. However there are some other issues about Melfi’s professionalism.

Chief among these problems is her attachment to Tony. Throughout the series, her family and her own therapist urge her to drop Tony as a patient for her own good. She herself even thinks about doing this, when he gets violent towards her or when she is just frightened of the things he will tell her. However, for most of the series she refuses out of concern, pride, attraction, fear, and everything besides professional ethics.

However, when she does break things off when Tony, it feels abrupt and abrasive. Tony, like many of the viewers, felt she abandoned him when he was at his most vulnerable, and did so with a lack of grace.

“As a doctor, I think what you’re doing is immoral.”

-Tony

Does the way she ended it, or any of her other behavior, make her a bad therapist?

Well, though I do consider myself something of an expert on the Sopranos, I am definitely not an expert on therapy or mental health. While I can safely talk about Melfi as a character, I don’t want to make blank statements about psychiatry in general without the knowledge to back it up.

So to that end I’ve consulted with two actual professionals. Dr. Allison is a licensed clinical psychologist, and Philip Karahassan is a counselor in the UK. Both have Youtube channels where they talk about therapy, and they were both gracious enough to help me out with this video.

Dr. Allison is a big fan of the show and of Dr. Melfi. One of the key takeaways I got from my conversation with her, is the fact that all therapists are different. There isn’t one correct style of therapy, so it wouldn’t be fair to compare her to any other therapist out there.

In particular, I wanted to know how she felt about a therapist dumping their client, as that was the thing that bothered the viewers the most about Melfi. She said that a therapist should be comfortable stepping back if they feel they can no longer help their client, but that she had waited too long and thus her breakup with Tony was a little too emotional.

All of that was good, but Dr. Allison, like myself, is a huge fan of the show, and her opinion of Melfi is of course biased by knowing the story and all of the characters.

So I also consulted with Phillip, who has only ever seen the first episode, which he did a blind review of on his channel. He nailed his analysis of Tony from this one viewing, which made me so excited to hear his thoughts on Melfi. When I showed him the clip of Melfi ending things with Tony, he said that a therapist can never know why someone is doing what they do, so to discount Tony as not being genuine in his attempt to get better is not the right thing to do.

Over all, these consults helped me learn a lot about therapy and psychology in general. However, at the end of this video, I’m still not sure how to judge Melfi. Which I think is the point of the show.

Tony is a character who defies categorization. He is one of the most complicated characters in television history, and just like him, Melfi is someone you can’t just place into a box marked good or bad. She, like all of us, had her moments of both, and how we view her says more about ourselves than it does about her.

And yes, I know that’s kind of a cop out answer for a video titled “Is Melfi a Good therapist?”, but hey, the show didn’t give a definitive resolution, so why should I?

Thank you again to Dr. Allison and Phillip. Both took time out of their busy schedules to help me with this video. I’ve linked both of their channels in the description, you should definitely check them out for not only mental health videos but also some awesome pop culture reactions!

And as always, stay tuned for more Sopranos videos, coming soon.