The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781250872494)

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, believed that 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.

Author: Alexander Stille
ISBN-10: 1250872499
ISBN-13: 9781250872494
Publisher: Picador USA
Language: English
Published: 06/18/2024
Pages: 432
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.25h x 5.38w x 1.00d