Jennifer Melfi (born 1954) was an American psychiatrist from Montclair, New Jersey.
Biography[]
Jennifer Melfi was born in 1954 to a family of Italian descent; her father's family came from Caserta in the Campania region of southern Italy. She graduated from Bard College and from the Tufts University School of Medicine, and she came to live an upscale life in a three-bedroom condominium in Essex Fells, New Jersey and shopping frequently at gourmet Italian shops. Melfi saw psychotherapist Elliot Kupferberg, he former teacher, and she would later become a psychiatrist herself.
In 1999, Melfi acquired a new patient, DiMeo crime family capo Tony Soprano. She set ground rules: he could not tell her anything incriminating, as she would be required to tell the police, but she was willing to listen to whatever he had to say. She became the person who came closest to understanding Soprano, and she pried into his personal life and diagnosed him with depression. Melfi dealt with his mood swings and outbursts, and she even had to deal with his love for her. That same year, Melfi was threatened when DiMeo boss Junior Soprano discovered that his nephew was seeing as psychiatrist, and Soprano had Melfi go into hiding to protect her. She did business and lived in a small roadside motel in Wayne, New Jersey until after Philly Parisi was killed, upon which she was able to return to Montclair.
In 2001, Melfi was raped in a parking garage, and her rapist was set free by the authorities because of an improper procedure performed by police. Melfi was haunted by this memory when she went to the restaurant where he worked and saw a smiling "Employee of the Month" picture of him on the wall, but she ultimately fought the urge to tell Soprano about the incident, knowing that Soprano would kill the man. After several failed attempts by both Melfi and Soprano to end their therapy sessions, Melfi attended a dinner party, where Kupferberg told the other doctors that Soprano was her patient. She realized, after a study revealed that talk therapy with sociopaths would only help them in becoming more sociopathic, that she might have been useless in healing Soprano, and may have been aiding his criminal lifestyle. On their last session, Melfi berated Soprano for tearing a page out of a magazine (not knowing that it was a steak recipe), demanded that he see another doctor, and told him that she did not want to intervene in his family crisis. When Soprano sarcastically placed the recipe page back in the magazine, Melfi shut the door on Soprano, ending their professional relationship once and for all.