The Greening of Tony Soprano

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Roszak found that mainstream psychologists weren’t much help with these issues. Their models of mental health were usually limited to a realm defined by the bedroom and the job. In Roszak’s view, it’s a bias shared by the profession’s big book, the DSM, which “never asks about the quality of people’s relationship with the natural world in which our species spent 99 percent of its evolutionary history.” The oversight is all the more odd in light of ample research that shows time in the wild can be deeply therapeutic, especially for the young. (Melfi confides in her shrink how ashamed she is when her son considers dropping out of college to join the forestry service.) The underlying problem is that most therapists are as deeply invested in our industrial culture as the rest of us. They don’t have much incentive to look into the deeper social disease when, in Roszak’s words, they “earn from urban angst.”

Roszak would like to see mainstream psychology repair itself by adopting a more ecological perspective. But Canadian psychotherapist Andy Fisher says, in effect, don’t bother. In his recent book, Radical Ecopsychology, he warns his peers to keep their distance from mental health care institutions that ultimately serve “the dominant power-interests of our society.” Fisher is convinced we’ll never be well until we dismantle a social machine that keeps us in a state of war with nature. Because standard therapy may be propping up this system on some deep level, he urges his colleagues to explore new methods, including the therapeutic power that earlier peoples found (or summoned) in rites and rituals. Once therapists have become social critics as well as healers, they can help to create a new culture that doesn’t so brutally sever us from the ancient needs and rhythms of human life.

Ironically, Tony believes that he, too, is living out a revolt against modern society. As he tells Dr. Melfi, he was determined not to end up like the “worker bees” that the early industrialists exploited “to build their cities and dig their subways and make them richer.” In one of the essays on Italian American life in A Sitdown with The Sopranos, E. Anthony Rotundo, author of a book on modern American masculinity, looks at the standards of manhood inside Tony’s band of thieves. “Whatever else organized crime may be,” he notes, “it is a vehicle for recreating an Italian village in a New World.” The show’s creator, David Chase, puts it more universally: “People are basically tribal.” Tribalism is alive and well in Soprano country, not only in Tony’s crew, but also in street gangs, police forces, unions, schools, and churches. All provide the status systems that we as primates seem to crave—and that society at large has gotten too large and complicated to provide for us.

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