The Greening of Tony Soprano

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And yet, could our tribal impulses be part of the problem? Tony’s own revival of traditional culture in the form of the Mob, complete with initiation rites and a ferociously rigid code of male behavior, makes you wonder. In fact, it’s hard to watch this dark comedy of American manners (or read about ecopsychology) without musing over the old question about just what kind of animal we really are. Back in the 18th century, the French moralist Jean Jacques Rousseau argued that we’re basically peaceful creatures trapped in a society that corrupts us. The 19th-century English romantics shared his anti-urban vision, as do most ecopsychologists today. An opposing view, expressed by Freud and the songwriter Nick Lowe among many others, is that a beast lurks inside us “caged by frail and fragile bands.” (Lowe’s bare-bones classic, “The Beast in Me,” fittingly closes the first Sopranos episode.) The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky was just as pessimistic. Evil was destined to poison every society, he wrote, because it rises from “man’s soul alone.”

In season three, Carmela visits an elderly psychiatrist who has become a harsh critic of his profession. He bluntly tells her that Tony’s only hope of being cured is to spend seven years in jail reflecting on his misdeeds and reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Calling Carmela an “accomplice” to her husband’s violence, he advises her to leave Tony and take the kids, “or what’s left of them” after growing up in a family riddled with deceit. Though she knows he’s right, she eventually seeks out a second opinion from a Catholic priest who is studying to be a psychologist. His subtle argument against divorce gives her the excuse she needs to put off the painful decision to leave her husband (and his money).

From a radical perspective like Andy Fisher’s, the priest appears to be confusing Carmela’s best interests with those of the social institution he ultimately serves. But you also have to acknowledge her willingness to play along. Carmela is tempting fate, and so are we, given our complicity in no less violent crimes against nature.

Fisher says that “ecopsychology has emerged largely from a sense of loss,” and one of its goals is simply to articulate such sorrow, which many people might feel today but have no way to express. Only then will anyone be able to realize that the “family” an animal lover like Tony fears losing may extend beyond his wife and children.

This deep sense of grief underlies one of the most troubling (and perhaps problematic) themes in ecopsychology. It’s the belief that most of us suffer from “psychic numbing,” a term first used by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton to describe a state he found among atomic bomb survivors in Japan. Many insist that environmental damage is having the same effect on a vastly wider scale. Activist and teacher Joanna Macy calls it our “dulled human response to our world,” born in the effort to repress an “anguish beyond naming.” For the perceptual psychologist Laura Sewall, it’s “a form of denial that shields us from fully experiencing the latest reports on ozone depletion, increasing pollution, toxicity, poverty, illness, and the death of species.” Roszak, Fisher, and many others would agree.

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