Psychoanalysis and free sex: The Sullivanians, a commune that mutated into a cult on New York’s Upper West Side
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It was not in some desert in Oregon, nor was there a guru from afar who laid down the rules and doctrine. The Sullivanians group operated in Manhattan — the apartments and houses in which its members lived, segregated by sex, were located in just a handful of streets on the Upper West Side — and the guidelines were dictated by Saul Newton (1906-1991), trained in Chicago’s anti-fascist circles and a brigade commander on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. The group that he created in the late 1950s with his fourth wife, Dr. Jane Pearce, advocated a radical, interventionist model of therapy: patients had to distance themselves from suffocating family ties and expand their circle of social and sexual relationships as widely as possible.
Over the years, the group became a cult, and its dissolution did not take place until 1991, the same year Newton died. “It was a radical social experiment: a 35-year attempt to reshape family, sexual, and social life in what might be America’s largest urban commune,” writes Alexander Stille in The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy and the Wild Life of an American Commune. Stille’s in-depth book and the documentary series The Fourth Wall, the first episode of which was presented at the most recent Tribeca Film Festival and directed by Luke Meyer, the son of a former member of the group, have broken the silence that has surrounded the Sullivanians. For more than three decades, the unique collective managed to operate under the radar, despite the fact that its members included well-known figures such as the painter Jackson Pollock, the dancer Lucinda Childs, and the novelist and screenwriter Richard Price.
Pollock, one of the most important figures in the abstract expressionism that shook up the art world in the United States in the 1950s, came to the Sullivanians through the legendary critic Clem Greenberg, who played a fundamental role in the growing popularity of the Sullivan Institute among artists of the time. “The group emerged in the late 1950s, a time when there was a response to the predominant culture with the beat generation, the Kinsey report on sexual conduct, or films like Rebel Without a Cause (1955),” Stille explains over the phone. But this rebellion against the established order led to an organization that maintained a tight control over the lives of its members. “One of my interviewees told me that the Stasi would have liked to have had that level of control over people in East Germany, because they controlled not only actions, but also thoughts. In therapy sessions, members confessed,” Stille says.
The group’s therapists, many of whom had been trained within the organization and had no official qualifications, determined who their patients should have sex with (the aim was to avoid “focusing” on a single partner), forced the separation of children, if they had any, and even decided which jobs they should keep. “I wanted to try to understand what led so many people to accept this. Belonging to the group offered a community, a place to live, and guilt-free sex,” explains the journalist and professor at Columbia University. His book steers clear of sensationalism. “That wouldn’t do this story justice,” he says.
Content retrieved from: https://english.elpais.com/culture/2024-09-25/psychoanalysis-and-free-sex-the-commune-that-mutated-into-a-cult-on-new-yorks-upper-west-side.html.
