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Harvey Greenberg, a Shrink’s Shrink
What my dad taught me about writing, compassion, and a winning poker hand
My father, Harvey Roy Greenberg, who died on June 11th, 2022, was the kind of iconic Upper West Side New York psychiatrist and public intellectual that defined an era. He was so iconic that at one point he was turned into an actual icon — animated as a cartoon psychiatrist for the 90s show Dr. Katz Professional Therapist. (He played Dr. Katz’s doctor). He was part of that rambunctious, Philip Roth-ian generation of Jewish movers-and-shakers that dominated the second half of the American century. He both drove and rode a boom in psycho-exploration that turned the country into a place where, for a time, it seemed, everyone had an analyst.
My dad was quick out of the gate, earning a Ford Scholarship and matriculating at Columbia at the ripe, young age of 16. Once at college he bounded through a pre-med curriculum and along the way edited The Jester, the university’s magazine of humor (“yoomor” as my father would say with his Brooklyn-by-way-of-Philadelphia accent.)
He was first and foremost a film addict, writing reviews and gladly twice-screening everything Hollywood had to offer up until the very end.
