College courses based on television shows are nothing new; plenty of universities are beginning to adapt curriculum to changing trends in media to include the rising respectability of television as an art form. There was the Whitman College course, Mad Men: Media, Gender, Historiography, the Game of Thrones examination at University of Virginia, and of course the myriad socioeconomic glimpses into The Wire.

All of these courses are surely registration nightmares as students eagerly try to sign up each semester, but perhaps none of the television-centered studies are more perfect than what Rutgers University associate professor Anthony Tobia has crafted for his students: the marriage of psychology and Seinfeld.

If ever there was a television series ripe for the picking of psychopathological dysfunction in how its characters interact with the world around them, it’s Seinfeld. Over the course of its 180 episode, nine season run, the show’s four main characters, Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer would light up a copy of the DSM like a Christmas tree for all of the brightly-colored sticky notes protruding from its pages.

Tobia is keenly aware of the value the series holds for his psychology students, and began implementing what he calls “Psy-feld” in training in 2009. Though not a full course, Tobia has made it a requirement of his students to immerse themselves in the world of Jerry and the gang every Monday and Wednesday night by tuning in to the 6 p.m. airing on TBS, and bringing discussion points to class the next day. As NJ.com points out, the exercise is incredibly valuable to Tobia’s students; once they were able to look at the show as more than a source of humor, they eagerly break down the characters’ various psychological maladies.

When discussing the show’s usefulness in seeing and diagnosing psychological problems, Tobia pinpoints exactly what he saw in originally creating the concept of Psy-feld: “When you get these friends together the dynamic is such that it literally creates a plot: Jerry’s obsessive compulsive traits combined with Kramer’s schizoid traits, with Elaine’s inability to forge meaningful relationships and with George being egocentric.” Each episode, all of which Tobia has a database for, including teaching notes, offers a treasure trove of talking points for his students. For years we’ve been laughing at the way the characters interact with the world, but Psy-feld is proof of the value that the medium of television, can offer educational fields.