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Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune
by Alexander Stille
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 became available and a maverick psychoanalytic institute, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, opened its doors in New York City. Its founders wanted to start a revolution, one grounded in ideals of creative expression, sexual liberation, and freedom from societal norms, and the revolution needed to begin at home. Dismantling the nuclear family―and monogamous marriage―would free kids from the repressive forces of their parents. The movement attracted many brilliant people as patients, including the painter Jackson Pollock and a swarm of other artists, the singer Judy Collins, and the dancer Lucinda Childs. By the 1960s, it had become an urban commune of hundreds of people, with patients living with other patients, leading a creative, polyamorous life.
By the mid-1970s, under the leadership of its cofounder Saul Newton, it devolved from a radical communal experiment into an insular cult, with therapists controlling virtually every aspect of their patients' lives, from where they lived to how often they saw their children. Although the group was highly secretive, even after its dissolution in 1991, Alexander Stille has reconstructed the inner life of this hidden parallel world. Through countless interviews and personal papers, The Sullivanians reveals the nearly unbelievable story of a fallen utopia in the heart of New York City.
"The life and times of a cult that was strange even as cults go...Stille's onrushing, riveting narrative makes The Blithedale Romance seem like a children's book by comparison...A brilliantly written, sobering investigation of a secret society within plain sight." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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." —Library Journal (starred review)
"Journalist Stille 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...Doggedly researched and thoroughly compassionate, this is a page-turning exposé." —Publishers Weekly
"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... [An] in-depth, endlessly absorbing history." —Booklist
"Though there were always whispers on the Upper West Side about our neighborhood cult, the Sullivanians kept their secrets well. Now Alexander Stille exposes their truth and it's more awful and bizarre than anything we'd imagined—a gothic tale of Boomer dreams for a better world twisted into control, abuse, and yes, even some amateur theater. But The Sullivanians doesn't stop there. Ultimately the questions it asks aren't just about cults; they're about the nature of family and what it means to belong." —Thomas Dyja, author of New York, New York, New York
"The tragic history of the notorious pseudo-psychoanalytic group known as the Sullivanians and the lives of its leaders and members is chronicled here by Alexander Stille with great clarity, without ever sacrificing complexity. The reader is given a carefully nuanced, insightful history of a social experiment begun in the 1960s that went horribly out of control over a period of 30 years. Each person described in the story is given dimensionality and humanity, which creates a far more moving and meaningful picture of a cult than the typical salacious accounts offered in the media. Stille's portrait of the Sullivanians, a group that is emblematic in so many ways of the human potential movement of the late 20th century, is fully relevant today. Cults and conspiracy theories have never been more prolific than now, in a (maybe) post-COVID world. Stille tells this fascinating history masterfully." —Daniel Shaw, psychoanalyst and author of Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation
This information about The Sullivanians was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Alexander Stille is the author of Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism, The Future of the Past, The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi, and The Force of Things: A Marriage in War and Peace. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New York Times.
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