The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, by Alexander Stille (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $30)
NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {I} t sounds fun to be a boozed-up artist in a high-brow sex house! To be a political radical! To totally reject your parents!
But the further you get into Alexander Stille’s utterly engrossing book The Sullivanians, the more you appreciate the unshakeable pull of the traditional nuclear family.
The book cleverly draws you into the characters, motivations, and delusions of the founders of the Sullivan Institute, a radical community created in 1957 around an offshoot of psychoanalytic theory. Its creators, the tyrannical and darkly captivating Saul Newton and the somewhat more sympathetic ideologue Jane Pearce, developed tantalizing theories of human growth. They taught that we develop throughout our lives through engaging with as many different individuals as possible. They therefore endorsed a kind of radical “chumship” that demands constant, varied socialization.
By this thinking, a child’s immediate family stymies him, monopolizing him and narrowing his exposure to ideas and emotional bonds. In fact, they averred that “the nuclear family caused most psychological problems and that mothers inevitably squelched their children’s vitality.” So they required a complete severing of ties with family and a rejection of not only marriage, but even exclusive relationships — which they termed “focus.” Even romance, or “hostile integration,” was deemed unacceptably damaging to mental health.
Newton and Pearce percolated these ideas while working for the less extreme theorist Harry Stack Sullivan during an era of exploding interest in Freudian psychology. When they founded their own institute (Jane was then Saul’s fourth wife), they named it for the man they considered a mentor. The lived experiment of their ideas, over the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, included the ownership of three buildings on Manhattan’s bookish Upper West Side, where members lived communally and received harsh, frequently abusive, therapy. The rules guiding the hundreds of cult devotees were both liberating and stringent. They were encouraged to fill date books with constant outings with friends and acquaintances — the more the better. At night, they were pushed to have platonic same-sex sleepovers when they weren’t penciled in elsewhere actually having sex.
Following the precept that engaging with lots of people is how we grow, Sullivanian doctrine insisted members have sex as often as possible with as many different partners as possible. Whether desire dictated it or not.
Naturally, this benefited some more than others. The greatest beneficiary was Newton himself, one character in this half-century tale who never gets redeemed. Newton was full of rage at his own parents (he believed his mother tried to murder him) and found a ready rage outlet in his eventual six wives, his many children both biological and adopted, and his patients. His temper was legendary and monstrous and was channeled into a form of therapy that informed patients that their mothers were “murderous bitches” and insisted they would end up as depressed drug addicts if they dared to leave the group. Newton was also a prime beneficiary of the group’s edicts on sex: He not only wielded power by demanding “dates” with women too overawed to say no, he also imposed fellatio on attractive patients as part of their sessions — for which they paid him.
Yet there is something terrifyingly compelling about the embrace of “chumship” — especially for a reader in the post-Covid and social-media-strained times we live in. This mandate brought lonely, lost individuals into socially crowded lives, packed with roommates, housemates, and lists of lovers. It drew in even hyper-accomplished celebrities such as Jackson Pollock and Judy Collins, whose existences it reshaped.
Also compelling, especially for struggling alcoholics like Pollock, was the friendly view his therapists had toward unfettered imbibing. Jane Pearce, herself an alcoholic, would regularly drink vodka while conducting even 11 a.m. therapy sessions. This was unquestionably destructive: Pollock’s drinking contributed to the breakdown of his marriage and to his fatal car accident, while Pearce’s health and looks deteriorated prematurely. But in our age of cautious self-care, there is something appealing about embracing life as a creative hot mess, as the Sullivanians encouraged. It holds a Gatsby-like glamour of indulgence so thrilling that it feels sustaining, even if deep down you know it is destructive.
And that is, in part, what makes the rise and fall of the Sullivanian commune so fascinating: It was enviably sustaining and tragically destructive. As readers, we feel the draw of communion, the weight of all that is horribly boring and burdensome about our own families, and the isolation of navigating friendships amid busy schedules and competing priorities. But we also see how life in what increasingly became a cynical cult was doomed, and we root for each member whom we meet through the book to liberate him- or herself before it is too late.
For many of them, the cult exacted an irreversible toll. Some Sullivanians never got to say goodbye to parents who died while the cult kept them heartlessly incommunicado. But the book conjures most successfully the poignant pain of loss surrounding childbirth and child-rearing caused by the Sullivanian rules and mindset.
A group member needed leadership’s approval to have a baby, at which point a woman was pushed to “date” as many men as possible during ovulation to ward off any assumed exclusive ties. The leaders also orchestrated adoptions by other group members, imposed largely to obscure any biological bonds between parents and children. Babies were mostly raised communally by babysitters until being shipped off to boarding school. Heartbroken mothers who resisted were brow-beaten with accusations that they were themselves becoming murderous bitches whose very presence would harm their children through smothering, maternal affection.
If you are a parent, you may find these stories hard to read without feeling that primal fear of separation. You tell yourself there is no force on earth you’d allow to take your children. But what if you were convinced that exposure to you would damage your kids psychologically? What if, like group member Deedee Agee (daughter of writer James Agee), you were only allowed to see your newborn briefly during the day and a few nights a week? What if your therapist and everyone you lived with insisted you were a “shit mother” and a “psychopath” until you finally believed it?
Of course, we hope that we would be like Marice Pappo, a heroine of the book, who was only allowed to see her infant daughter Jessica for ten minutes daily. Pappo hired a lawyer, who helped her arrange to bring two bodyguards and kidnap her own daughter and escape to Pennsylvania. Pappo’s custody battle was one of the first nails in the coffin of the cult, bringing media attention to its dangers and inspiring other members to break free.
And as the 1980s wore on, the group caused its own downfall, becoming more authoritarian. Its guidelines became more rigid and insulating, focused on the “narcissism of small differences” between correct and incorrect behavior. In response to the AIDS epidemic, members were forbidden to even eat in restaurants. As the institute’s financial straits mounted, head therapists badgered patients into becoming computer programmers, a highly lucrative emerging field. They forced members to devote time and money they couldn’t afford to the Fourth Wall, the Sullivanian radical-lefty theater company.
Members, plagued by their own inner doubts but too terrified to leave the cult, became intolerant of each other. They reported on one another’s transgressions — Stasi-style — conducting physical intimidation and becoming complicit in countless forms of harm. In the end, custody battles, investigations into psychiatric misconduct, financial fraud and destitution, and Newton’s death dissolved the group in 1991.
In addition to cataloguing the damage done to members forced to suppress their parental instincts, the book delves into the impact on children born Sullivanian. These children grew up unaware of who among the adults that raised them, including their legal parents, were their biological mom and dad. Their lives took jolting turns at Saul Newton’s whims. They were abandoned at unaccredited boarding schools, banned from returning home over vacations, and had their heart-wrenching pleas for affection, closeness, and constancy snubbed decisively by their brainwashed parents.
Stille, a Columbia Journalism School professor who lives in the neighborhood where the cult once existed, bookends his account with these damaged children’s quests to identify their biological parents and understand their confusing origins and youths. Surprisingly, many of the kids raised in this traumatizing system managed academic and professional success.
Less surprisingly, many sought and achieved their own stable marriages, prioritizing closeness with their own children.
The saga offers a chilling warning about today’s popular, progressive narratives that chosen family can be as satisfying — or more — than the unique family fate saddled us with or that parents make their own children unsafe through questioning gender dysphoria or challenging class curricula.
The lesson of the Sullivanians is that, yes, we gain from intimate friendships and outside-the-box political thinking. But by rejecting exclusive responsibilities between parents, partners, and children, we hurt not only ourselves but those who love us the most.