Therapists Reveal Their New Obsession: 'The Sopranos' (Published 2001) (2024)

Grappling with feelings of loss and abandonment now that ''The Sopranos'' has been snatched away from your Sunday nights? Nothing to be ashamed of here. Your therapist, should you consult one, may be enduring the same grief.

Psychologists and psychiatrists around the country -- especially the psychoanalytically inclined -- have been watching the HBO series, which just ended its third season, with an almost cultish devotion.

''So many therapists like the show,'' said Dr. Barbara Pizer, a psychologist who practices in Cambridge, Mass., and teaches at Harvard Medical School. ''It's a heightened and condensed version of what goes on in real life.''

''The Sopranos'' offers a refreshingly credible version of what happens in therapy, according to Dr. Pizer and other analysts.

''It's the best representation of the work we do that has ever been in film or on television,'' said Dr. Philip Ringstrom, an analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles.

Last year, two of the show's writers, Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess, got an award from the Western Regional Psychoanalytic Association for their portrayal of the therapy sessions of the show's main character, Tony Soprano, a New Jersey Mafia boss plagued by panic attacks.