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

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, wanted to start a revolution, one grounded in ideals of creative expression, sexual liberation, and freedom from the expectations of society, and the revolution, they felt, needed to begin at home. 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
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 06/20/2023
Pages: 432
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.39lbs
Size: 9.26h x 6.38w x 1.42d
ISBN: 9780374600396

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 01/01/2023 pg. 17
Publishers Weekly 04/03/2023
Kirkus Reviews 04/15/2023
Booklist 05/01/2023 pg. 16
Library Journal 05/01/2023 pg. 96
Shelf Awareness 06/23/2023

About the Author
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. Stille is the San Paolo Professor of International Journalism at Columbia University and lives in New Yor