The Shrink Next Door
Part 4: The Familia
The guest list for the Hamptons parties was filled with celebrities. But mingling among those guests were some of Ike’s patients. And not just Marty.
The photo hung in the Hamptons house for years, an indelible scene from one of the parties that Ike Herschkopf — psychiatrist, business consultant, host — threw there over more than two decades.
In the center of the shot, wearing a bathing suit, sits Herschkopf. He’s surrounded by three women in bathing suits. Two women are resting their hands on his thighs. The third is behind him, her arms dangling over his neck, her fingers near his waistband.
The three women were Herschkopf’s psychiatric patients, they and others said in interviews.
The photo cuts straight to a point that several of Herschkopf’s former charges raised in interviews: Did he blur the traditional doctor-patient boundaries to their detriment? Several psychiatrists, in interviews, said the line isn’t always bright. But most interactions outside the four walls of the doctor’s office can raise flags, they said.
Herschkopf’s patients — in letters to Bloomberg, he calls them — “clients” — not only sat for therapy sessions but also went on walks with him and met him in restaurants. They say they socialized with him at events like the parties he threw for 23 summers at Marty Markowitz’s Hamptons home.
Markowitz, who first sought therapy from Herschkopf in 1981, even wrote the doctor’s family into his will. And he wasn’t alone, he would eventually learn from another frequent Hamptons party guest.
For those parties, Herschkopf picked the guests and played host to medical colleagues, Manhattan friends, some celebrities — and a handful of patients.
“To be invited to Ike’s party, that meant you were in the inner circle,” said one former patient, who like others I speak to in this episode asked not to be identified by real names. The patient, whom I’ll call Judith, said she went to at least 30 of the parties over the years. “That meant you weren’t just his patient who paid him and saw him every week, you were part of the familia.”
Judith began seeing Herschkopf in the late 1980s. She said she was having flashbacks and “remembering a very abusive childhood at the hands of my mother, and I couldn’t deal with what I was remembering.”
Like many other patients I spoke to, Judith said Herschkopf helped her, especially early on. She also said she became dependent on their frequent meetings. “We could go without eating, but I couldn’t go without seeing him,” she said. “I didn’t make any decision in my marriage or in my mothering without checking with Ike.”
Those decisions were life-altering. She cut off contact with her mother. Then, when she learned her mother was dying, she said Herschkopf urged her to write a letter to her father laying out every terrible thing her mother had done to her.
Judith met another one of Herschkopf’s patients, “Sarah,” at one of the parties. They became close. But when Sarah and the doctor had a falling out a few years later, he gave Judith an ultimatum: It’s her or me.
With her mother near death, Judith felt she couldn’t leave her therapist. With his help, she said, she wrote a letter ending the friendship with Sarah. When her mother died, she neither attended the funeral nor sat shiva, the traditional weeklong mourning period in Judaism. Judith, like Markowitz, had cut people from her life until there was just Ike Herschkopf.
When I asked him about Judith, Herschkopf told me in an email that she had never blamed him for decisions she made about her parents while she was in therapy. He suggested I had encouraged her to blame him.
Then there was “Emily.” A wealthy businesswoman with an opulent lifestyle, she came to Herschkopf because she was facing a series of personal crises. He helped her — while also, bit by bit, moving the boundaries of the relationship, she said. After a half-dozen or so years with Herschkopf, Emily changed her will, leaving a “substantial amount” of money to his children, she said.
I asked Herschkopf both in 2012 and more recently whether he prompted Emily to will money to his children. He has never answered the question directly. But in 2012 he did say in an email that he had never “plotted” to inherit Emily’s fortune.
“Why would I want to increase my children’s inheritance when I am an outspoken advocate that children’s inheritances should be severely circumscribed in order to maintain their work ethic, their social conscience, and as an antidote against gold digging suitors,” he wrote.
As for the parties, Herschkopf wrote that few people there were his clients — and most of those were there because they came with other guests.
Dr. Jonathan Brodie, the former head of psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital—and a frequent guest at Ike’s parties — defended Herschkopf’s practice of inviting patients to his parties. “Before a person is a patient, they are a human being, and ‘patient’ just defines a particular relationship in a particular context,” he said. “If you’re outside of that context, then the person isn’t really a patient. The person is a person.”
A number of other psychiatrists I spoke with for this story took a harder line.
As the American Psychiatric Association puts it in a 2015 paper: “All interaction with a patient should be for the benefit of the patient [and] all interactions that could potentially cause harm or misunderstanding should be avoided.”
When I asked Herschkopf about this, he told me that the 1981 ethics guidelines from the APA looked quite different. He pointed out that there’s no discussion of boundaries in that document, and that it’s only 6½ pages. He wrote, “In ethics, standards in the 1980s were very different than they are today.”
But even back then there were touchstone examples of boundary blurring. During Marilyn Monroe’s last years, her psychiatrist essentially controlled her life, cutting her off from old friends and taking over her finances. Her biographer, Donald Spoto, described it as a “betrayal” of the doctor’s professional ethics.
And in the 1970s and ’80s, around when Herschkopf began treating Markowitz, a psychotherapist named Eugene Landy became the therapist of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson — and also his business manager, co-songwriter and executive producer. The state of California accused Landy of forming an improper “dual relationship” with Wilson and exerting too much control over his patient. In 1989, Landy surrendered his license to practice in the state.
There’s a reason the boundaries exist: Sound therapeutic relationships are exclusively therapeutic relationships. Crossing the boundaries can often distort the therapy.
According to Joerg Bose, a former director of the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology, what brings many patients to therapy is a “deficit of love and affection” rooted in childhood. A psychiatrist, providing attention and care, can begin to fill some of that void.
“But a therapist’s role is not to fill the deficit like only the real parent could have at the time,” said Bose, who wasn’t addressing specific cases. “Trying to do that would interfere with the patients’ needing to develop an understanding how these early deficits affect their lives and relationship choices now.”
Emily changed her will again, writing Herschkopf’s kids back out. When she ended her therapy with Herschkopf in the mid-2000s, she urged some of his other patients, mostly people she had referred to him, to leave as well. She called Markowitz. He listened, but he didn’t follow Emily out the door.
It was clear, Emily told me, that Markowitz wasn’t ready. Not yet.
