BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
Becoming a forensic psychologist and psychoanalyst wasn’t a childhood dream. I didn’t know what a psychoanalyst was until my college years. Following my father’s recommendation to learn a trade, I attended a vocational and technical high school and planned to become an electrician, not a bad career choice for a working class, South Brooklyn son. During my third year of high school, my shop teacher took me aside and suggested I reconsider my career path. I had almost electrocuted myself several times working on the electrical systems that we used in shop class. He was concerned that I would eventually kill myself. He said my shop work was shoddy at best, but I always got high grades on his tests and he saw how I helped classmates with their academics. He suggested I consider attending college to become an engineer. It was a relief to hear and it made sense to me. My older brother was already studying engineering.
I switched to college prep classes and after high school, I took pre-engineering classes at junior college before becoming an electrical engineering student at City College of New York. I was decent at the math and science, but something was askew. Unlike most of the engineering students, I found the required humanities classes – the ones my peers just tolerated – as the most interesting. By my junior year of college, I was faced with a decision: switch majors or accept the reality that soon I’d be working as an engineer. In one of my required humanities classes, we had read and discussed sections of Sigmund Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents.” To use a phrase from the early seventies, that book “blew my mind.” It was its theme that resonated with me, with what I 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.
With excitement and fear, I soon switched my major to psychology and, in a New York minute, I 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, I had the great fortune of attending and graduating from the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (now the New Center for Psychoanalysis) of which I am a faculty member. LAPSI was the first psychoanalytic institute in western United States, founded in the1920s with the blessing of Professor Dr. Freud himself. It had and has a very deep bench of nationally and internationally known training psychoanalysts from which to learn theory and treatment.
I also went on to receive post-doctoral training in neuropsychology and specialized training in mental disability law, which is crucial when conducting criminal psychological evaluations. However, my psychoanalytic perspective and clinical experience is fundamental. It schooled me into focusing on a person’s inner life, with all its darkness and light. The training taught me how to best focus on the interior life of another- his or her thoughts, feelings and desires, the conflicting inevitable emotions in us all that must be reckoned with at one time or another.
As a forensic psychologist trained in psychoanalysis, I’m deeply attuned to an individual’s emotional turmoil, his intentions and conflicts, and his purposefulness – the drivers of behavior. Since the commission of most crimes require both criminal behavior and an accompanying mental state that is intentional and purposeful, my comfort and expertise in dwelling within the deeply subjective is an asset when conducting complex forensic examinations.
