The Worst of Marxism, Psychoanalysis, and the Musical Theater

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, by Alexander Stille

This is a very readable book, and what follows isn’t so much a review as a reflection prompted by it. The sordid shocking story it tells – of the Sullivanian therapy cult that operated in Manhattan from the 1950s until its collapse in 1991 – is filled with lurid, mind-boggling detail.

Again and again, it demonstrates the extraordinary capacity of human beings – mostly well-educated, professional people in this case – to be drawn into believing the veriest nonsense and to behave in ways utterly at odds with who they once were. People allowed themselves to be treated coercively, outsourced their critical faculties, and, in some cases, wielded power over others with a cruelty that contradicted all their former instincts.

The Sullivanians promised liberation and community, but ultimately delivered hierarchy, surveillance, and a leader who behaved like a petty tyrant. Saul Newton and Jane Pearce took Harry Stack Sullivan’s ideas about interpersonal growth and pushed them into a worldview in which the family was the enemy, repression was lethal, and therapy would complete the revolution Marxism had left unfinished. This radical therapy project offered to free people from the oppression of parents, monogamy, and capitalism. What it delivered instead was something closer to Orwell’s Animal Farm on the Upper West Side.

It began innocently enough in the 1950s. Pearce was a respected psychoanalyst and MD; Newton a charismatic Marxist and ambitious fabulist with a clerical job. (The history is murky, but he went to Spain in 1937 and may well have inflated his role from pay-clerk to fascist-killing combatant.)

Their big idea was simple: the traditional family wasn’t merely flawed – it was the primary mechanism of capitalist oppression. Smash the family and you could free the individual. Free enough individuals and you could change the world.

Pearce believed that she had developed an approach to psychoanalysis that would emancipate her patients. She was convinced she had the right to intervene in their lives – pushing them to break from the families, to take on multiple sexual partners even if they were reluctant to do so. She developed a series of therapeutic tactics that therapists could easily manipulate if they wished to take over their patients’ lives.

Repress Nothing, Indulge Everything

The prescription was hedonistic and, at first, seductive. Repress nothing. Indulge everything. Multiple sex partners were mandatory; children optional and later discouraged. Parental and family ties were toxic and to be severed. Therapy became a lifelong revenue-generating scheme in which patients paid therapists, therapists paid senior therapists, and everyone paid loyalty up the pyramid to Newton and – after Pearce was sidelined – a cohort of three senior therapists known informally as the “gang of four”. Money flowed upward; control, surveillance, and coercion flowed downward.

The Cultural Pipeline

What members received in return was instant everything: friends, sex, housing, purpose – a ready-made community of educated, often creative young adults who wanted to believe that the nuclear family was a relic of bourgeois neurosis. There was even a cultural pipeline: Clement Greenberg steered artists and Abstract Expressionists, Jackson Pollock among them, toward the Institute’s orbit. Later there was a political drama group – the Fourth Wall – that took over a theater space with violence.

Being a Sullivanian meant you could hate your parents, sleep with whomever the leadership approved, justify violence, and call it all “growth.” It felt like adulthood without responsibility, revolution without sacrifice, self-indulgence without guilt, and therapy without end.

The group that took on the name the Sullivanians became a secretive, self-perpetuating closed system. What had begun as a utopian experiment in alternative living hardened into an increasingly paranoid and violent cult that was financially and sexually exploitative and, ultimately, doomed.

As narcissism ran rampant at the top, the group devolved into a place where petty things – such as rearranging the furniture in a group apartment – could trigger existential drama. Perceived dissidents were purged. There were threats of expulsion and members were repeatedly told that life outside meant the end of personal growth – it meant deterioration, insanity, and death. Leaving was an act of self-destruction and akin to suicide. The world was a dangerous place. Inside, you were safe and could continue to grow. There were violent episodes and ever-rising levels of paranoia. House meetings turned into mini-Maoist struggle and confession sessions.

The End

Eventually, it was the lawsuits – especially the child-custody battles – that brought the glare of public scrutiny and the beginning of the end. Jonestown intensified media interest in cults. Former members who had found a way out, along with parents and families, were finally able to challenge Sullivania directly.

Slowly, then all at once, the cult was confronted and it crumbled. Newton died in 1991. Disciplinary proceedings against the senior therapists followed.

And just like that, it was over.

The Racket and the Reckoning

For many who left, the hardest reckoning came afterward: understanding how the group had overwritten their sense of self, how idealism slid so easily into obedience, and how a community promising liberation ended up practising the very totalitarianism it claimed to oppose. As one member put it, “I joined a movement that became a business, then a racket.”

Leaving was profoundly disorienting. Defectors had to confront the version of themselves that had existed inside the group. Who was that person? The experience revealed how powerful a tightly controlled community can be in grafting a new personality.

Once outside, they faced the agonizing question of how they had come to believe things that now seemed hollow, even absurd. Years had been lost. Critical thinking, judgment, and independence had been outsourced to the collective. For the ones I knew personally – perhaps less deeply embedded – it was the support network of friendships and connections that seemed hardest to let go.

At its most benign, the Sullivan Institute was an experiment in alternative living – a utopian community of support. At its least benign, it was a coercive, exploitative, and often sadistic cult that deliberately dismantled families and tore children away from their parents.

We all Went a Little Mad

I was drawn to reading Stille’s book partly because all of this happened not far from where I now live, and partly because I knew people who were among those drawn into the Sullivanian orbit in the 1970s.

I also found myself thinking about the parallels with other organizations led and misled by powerful charismatic figures – schools for example. My mind also went to movements that, while lacking a single dominating leader, nonetheless display the same disturbing patterns of absolute certainty, enforced conformity, and the subordination of human relationships and plain common sense to doctrine.

And perhaps this leads to the larger point. We don’t need to peer into the dim and distant past to find mind-boggling examples of people – even ourselves – believing the veriest nonsense. In truth, we all went a little mad in 2020.

We laugh at our ancestors for dance manias, for glass-delusions, for the Salem witches, for their bouts of collective unreason. Yet our own era, for all its science and sophistication, is no less susceptible to contagions of fear, hysteria, and beliefs that, in any other age, would have been dismissed as utterly unhinged.

“They combined the worst of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the musical theater” – Esther Newton reflecting on her father’s legacy, the Sullivan institute, and the Fourth Wall.