0:18 / 1:14:39 Decoding Madness-A Look Inside the Human Mind

<p>For Richard Lettieri, becoming a forensic psychologist and psychoanalyst wasn’t a childhood dream. He didn’t know what a psychoanalyst was until his college years.</p><p>During his third year of high school, his shop teacher took him aside and suggested he reconsider his career path. Lettieri had almost electrocuted himself several times working on the electrical systems that were used in shop class. The teacher was concerned that Lettieri would eventually kill himself. He suggested Lettieri consider attending college to become an engineer.</p><p>He switched to college prep classes and after high school, took pre-engineering classes at junior college before becoming an electrical engineering student at City College of New York. He was decent at the math and science, but something was askew. Unlike most of the engineering students, Lettieri found the required humanities classes – the ones my peers just tolerated – as the most interesting.</p><p>By his junior year of college, Lettieri was faced with a decision: switch majors or accept the reality that soon he’d be working as an engineer. In one of his required humanities classes, the class had read and discussed sections of Sigmund Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents.” To use a phrase from the early seventies, that book got his attention. It was its theme that resonated with Lettieri, with what he knew but didn’t: that there’s an inevitable clash between desire and restraint, and that a compromise between the two is the price for civility.</p><p>With excitement and fear, Lettieri soon switched his major to psychology and, in a New York minute, he had Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees from City College and some years later, a doctorate from the University of Southern California. After some years of clinical practice, Lettieri had the great fortune of attending and graduating from the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (now the New Center for Psychoanalysis) of which he is a faculty member. LAPSI was the first psychoanalytic institute in western