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The Sullivanians

Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune

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1 of 2 copies available
1 of 2 copies available

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 GOTHAM BOOK PRIZE

The devolution of the Sullivan Institute, from psychoanalytic organization to insular, radical cult.

In the middle of the Ozzie and Harriet 1950s, the birth control pill was introduced and a maverick psychoanalytic institute, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, opened its doors in New York City. Its founders, Saul Newton and Jane Pearce, wanted to start a revolution, one grounded in ideals of creative expression, sexual liberation, and freedom from the expectations of society, and the revolution, they felt, needed to begin at home. Dismantling the nuclear family—and monogamous marriage—would free people from the repressive forces of their parents. In its first two decades, the movement attracted many brilliant, creative people as patients: the painter Jackson Pollock and a swarm of other abstract expressionist artists, the famed art critic Clement Greenberg, the singer Judy Collins, and the dancer Lucinda Childs. In the 1960s, the group evolved into an urban commune of three or four hundred people, with patients living with other patients, leading creative, polyamorous lives.
But by the mid-1970s, under the leadership of Saul Newton, the Institute had devolved from a radical communal experiment into an insular cult, with therapists controlling virtually every aspect of their patients' lives, from where they lived and the work they did to how often they saw their sexual partners and their children. Although the group was highly secretive during its lifetime and even after its dissolution in 1991, the noted journalist Alexander Stille has succeeded in reconstructing the inner life of a parallel world hidden in plain sight in the middle of Manhattan. Through countless interviews and personal papers, The Sullivanians reveals the nearly unbelievable story of a fallen utopia.

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    • Library Journal

      January 1, 2023

      Founded in 1950s New York, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis espoused ideals of creative expression, sexual liberation, and freedom from society's norms, starting with the dismantling of the nuclear family. Its famous patients ranged from Jackson Pollack to Judy Collins. By the 1970s, its therapists had become abusive tyrants, and it was shuttered in the 1990s. Stille (Excellent Cadavers) tells the story. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

      Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 3, 2023
      Journalist Stille (Excellent Cadavers) takes an intimate and engrossing look at the Sullivan Institute, a radical polygamous therapy group that emerged in 1950s New York City and Amagansett, Long Island. Named for Harry Stack Sullivan, a mental health pioneer who challenged traditional family values, and founded in 1957 by married therapists—and avowed communists—Saul Newton and Jane Pearce, the institute aimed to “champion repressed desires” by encouraging patients to “experiment sexually, trust their impulses, and break free of family dependency relationships.” Celebrity followers included novelists Richard Elman and Richard Price, singer Judy Collins, and art critic Clement Greenberg, who recruited painters Jackson Pollock and James Olitski. In 1975, some members launched a political theater group, The Fourth Wall Repertory Company, that was eventually taken over by Newton and his fifth wife, actor Joan Harvey, and became a vehicle for reinforcing Newton’s “personality cult” and asserting his “autocratic” control over the community. Drawing on candid interviews with ex-members and their children, Stille documents how Newton and his wives seduced patients, promoted alcohol and promiscuity, and raised children communally. Eventually, a series of custody battles between defectors and members—coupled with Newton’s advancing dementia and violent behavior—led to the institute’s dissolution in 1991. Doggedly researched and thoroughly compassionate, this is a page-turning exposé.

    • Booklist

      May 1, 2023
      In 1957, then-married couple Saul Newton and Jane Pearce opened the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis. The duo's particular psychotherapy practice revolved around dismantling the traditional nuclear family, citing parents as the provenance for all psychological problems. They encouraged creative forms of expression and polyamory. Their freewheeling philosophy attracted famous names like artist Jackson Pollack and singer Judy Collins. As the institute began to grow, patients were encouraged to live communally and started referring to themselves as Sullivanians. The endeavor started harmoniously but devolved into textbook cult behavior as therapists exerted more control over patients' lives. Leadership demanded patients cut ties with their families, broke up relationships, and forcefully separated parents from their children. By the late 1980s, several high-profile custody cases damaged the group's reputation, leading to its dissolution in the early 1990s. Stille interviewed multiple Sullivanians and poured over personal papers and court documents to develop a linear account of the group's astonishing rise and decline. Readers will appreciate this in-depth, endlessly absorbing history of an obscure cult.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from May 1, 2023

      Therapists Jane Pearce and Saul Newton founded the Sullivan Institute, named after neo-Freudian Harry Stack Sullivan, in 1957. Stille (international journalism, Columbia Univ.; The Force of Things) interviewed 60 former institute members to construct the most authoritative account of counterculture family re-engineering gone wrong. The interviewees tell many things. For example, they said commitment-free and frequent sexual relations were the norm. Children, often declared the source of postpartum psychosis and frequently sent to boarding schools where they suffered mistreatment, were communally raised with loose to no parental bonds. Eventually, Newton replaced Pearce with a series of polygamist marriages and became controlling and sexually abusive towards his patients. Yet the commune thrived until the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and didn't disband until 1991. A generation of commune children were left to process abuse; some didn't know who their birth parents were. The widespread fallout is engrossing and mesmerizing. VERDICT This gripping tale of an attempted societal shift will entrance readers. Well-researched and accessible, its broad appeal makes it a necessary part of sociology and psychology collections.--Jessica A. Bushore

      Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from April 15, 2023
      The life and times of a cult that was strange even as cults go. Prolific journalist Stille examines the Sullivanians, offshoot followers of psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949), "high-performing urban professionals--doctors, lawyers, computer programmers, successful artists and writers, professors--who went to normal jobs by day but returned in the evening to a very different and highly secretive world." That world, encompassing some major cultural figures, embraced polygamy and polyamory and the group raising of children and abnegation of the nuclear family. Moreover, belonging to it required fealty to a psychologist named Saul Newton and a succession of his wives, one a "rather conventional young woman from a middle-class Jewish family" who tasted power and, by the account of some members, took a tyrannical turn. In the end, it was a sort of Ponzi scheme: "Therapists" unqualified to practice outside the cult took money from lesser "therapists," and most of it wound up in the hands of the leaders. So it went from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, when some members, awakened by one injury or another, began to drift away. Stille's onrushing, riveting narrative makes The Blithedale Romance seem like a children's book by comparison. As Newton and company became worse and worse, he demanding sexual favors from every woman in the Sullivanian orbit, a quiet resistance grew. Surprisingly, children raised collectively and discouraged to seek the identity of their biological parents embarked on that search during adulthood, while a few of the erstwhile leaders came to accept that maybe their program was highly flawed. As with so many cults, the Orwellian principle that some animals are more equal than others shines through always. "Although it was in principle an egalitarian communist group," Stille writes, "the Sullivanians were remarkably hierarchical, and everyone was aware where they stood at any given moment in the pecking order." A brilliantly written, sobering investigation of a secret society within plain sight.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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