In the 1950s, a quasi-psychoanalytical organization called the Sullivan Institute began to gain a following among the intellectuals and creatives of NYC. The Sullivanians argued that nuclear family and emotional attachments were destructive to human nature and encouraged communal living…[Continue Reading...]
“I was like reborn,” the art critic Clement Greenberg once remembered, “it was the most important event in my life.” The event in question was his encounter with Sullivanian therapy. His biographer, Florence Rubenfeld, once wrote that it would not…[Continue Reading...]
The postwar era saw many attempts to find new ways of thinking and living that avoided the dissatisfactions and interpersonal nightmares that often arose in more traditional structures. Since human happiness and flourishing are difficult and can't be hacked with…[Continue Reading...]
When I was a kid, my big brother Chris was my universe. He was handsome, musically gifted and an A student ― the complete package. Our cultural differences marked our age difference. Chris was The Beatles and The Band; I…[Continue Reading...]
Saul Newton wanted to be a good father, so he granted his grown daughter Esther’s wish: When her female friends came to his office for therapy, he promised he would no longer ask those women for oral sex. He wasn’t…[Continue Reading...]
“The most tragic thing that happened to me in the group was that not too long after I got into it, my mother died, and they wouldn’t let me go see her,” says Janie P. Janie wasn’t kidnapped, jailed or…[Continue Reading...]
Famed modern artist Jackson Pollock's car crash death has been blamed on a New York cult that encouraged the alcoholic painter to hit the bottle and cheat on his wife. The cult, also known as the Sullivanians, advocated alcohol use…[Continue Reading...]
There were a number of things that might have attracted a person to the Sullivan Institute, the maverick psychoanalytic practice and cult that flourished on the Upper West Side from 1957 until its acrimonious dissolution in 1991: the twin promise…[Continue Reading...]
Screen Rant is proud to present an exclusive clip from the character-driven documentary series The Fourth Wall, which premiered in early June at the Tribeca Film Festival. The docuseries is told from the perspective of Keith Newton, who was born…[Continue Reading...]
I had been living on the Upper West Side for decades when, in the 2010s, I realized I had been entirely unaware of what was, in effect, an alternate society in our midst, hidden in plain sight. Founded in 1957,…[Continue Reading...]
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