The Sullivanians

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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