A Cult 'Hiding in Plain Sight' Amid the New York Brownstones

In “The Sullivanians,” Alexander Stille recalls the heyday of an experiment in communal living that blurred the boundaries between therapists, patients and lovers.


Alexandra Jacobs
New York Times
June 18, 2023


THE SULLIVANIANS: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, by Alexander Stille


Legal marijuana notwithstanding, true New Yorkers have long prided themselves on resisting certain Californish things. Malls. Cars. Cults.

Maybe that’s why the astounding story that pours forth from Alexander Stille’s new book “The Sullivanians,” about hundreds of people who got sucked into a very peculiar live-work situation on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for decades, isn’t better known.

Denial: It’s not just a river in Egypt that’s much bigger than the Hudson. It’s also one of those slightly antiquated pop-psychology terms, like paranoia and transference, that used to get passed around cultured Manhattan living rooms along with glasses of Riunite and overchilled Brie on Triscuits. Everyone was in analysis: an intellectual pursuit. No one called it therapy, that soft millennial word.

Stille, a journalism professor at Columbia University whose most relevant previous book was about the Mafia, found this “alternate society in our own midst, hidden in plain sight,” and explores it through dozens of interviews, personal and legal papers, and several memoirs, published and unpublished. Like a hawk crouching on a grotesque at the fabled Apthorp building, which also makes a cameo in this tale, he gives us a keen bird’s-eye view.

That some (not all) Sullivanians referred to themselves as Sullivanians at all is a bit of historical misdirection. Harry Stack Sullivan was an eminent American psychiatrist who died in 1949. He had advocated a warmer clinical practice than that of the distant, frosty Freudians, placing special emphasis on the importance of peer interaction, which he called “chumship,” in human development.

One of his star pupils was Jane Pearce, who finished her medical training at the well-regarded William Alanson White Institute, which Sullivan helped to found. She met Saul Newton, a communist labor organizer with major red flags in the woman department, at a bridge game in Chicago. Eventually he came to work in the White Institute’s bursar’s office and they married (his fourth time). The couple swiped her teacher’s name to start their own institute in 1957.

What ensued, which Stille recounts with an almost claustrophobic intimacy, must have Sullivan rolling over on his couch for all eternity.

The bellicose Newton had no formal training and clearly had his own unresolved issues — he once beheaded a flock of diseased chicks at the behest of his tyrannical father. Yet from the beginning he exerted so much influence and authority over the new institute that Clement Greenberg, the art critic who was an early patient and referred Jackson Pollock and others, called his treatment method Newtonian.

Its fundamental premise was to break the bonds between parent and child: “splitting the atom of the nuclear family,” Stille writes, “and scattering its pieces.” Mothers were thought to be particularly malevolent. Free love was encouraged— if insisting that close, exclusive attachments are unhealthy can really count as “free.” Alcohol was considered an elixir, as salubrious as green juice.

This all began in a period of postwar conformity that creative people were naturally motivated to flout, and got more out-there as the ’60s and ’70s progressed. Besides many artists, those whom Stille locates, at various points, in the Sullivanian orbit include musicians (Judy Collins, members of the band Sha Na Na, Elliott Randall, a guitarist on the Steely Dan hit “Reelin’ in the Years”); authors and the author-adjacent (Richard Price, James Agee’s daughter Deedee); and the dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs.

Later, members would be urged to learn computer programming, against many of their natural inclinations but more reliably lucrative for the organization, which billed for analysis and eventually invested in real estate and other projects.

Image

Expanding into dormlike apartments segregated by gender, Newton and his cohort offered some who were suffering from urban loneliness a ready-made community and a satisfyingly full datebook. “Add water and it’s instant friends,” Price told Stille. “It’s instant sex life … like somebody opened the gates of heaven.”

In 1975 the group started a political theater repertory company, the Fourth Wall. “They combined the worst of Marxism, psychoanalysis and the musical theater,” said one of Saul’s daughters, Esther Newton, an anthropologist known for her germinal research on drag queens.

A major amusement of “The Sullivanians” is how it conjures the bad old days of New York City in all its lurid colors. One woman kills a cockroach crawling up the wall during a lovemaking session; another reclines on a bench in the middle of Broadway with a paper plate over her crotch and a Dixie cup on each breast.

There is theft (“Only in a lefty group would someone be accused of stealing a pottery kiln,” Stille notes) and wacky food restrictions, prompting two rebels to make a “cheeseburger oath” of secrecy as they sat in a forbidden restaurant and discussed their doubts. After the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown, many in the group fled for a time to Disney World, where in a kind of “apocalyptic bacchanalia” they took sedatives and had group sex in a Howard Johnson’s.

The community always had its own special vocabulary. One exercise, sometimes postcoital, was delivering a harsh character assessment known as a “summary.” Getting too involved with someone, which was seen as dependency, was “romantic focus.” “The Conditions of Human Growth,” a book co-authored by Newton and Pearce in 1963, suggested especially intense romantic focus was a form of “hostile integration.” (“What most people would call ‘falling in love,’” as Stille observes.)

Ethics were questionable from the beginning: Pearce glugged vodka even in morning sessions, while Newton, along with serial cheating on Pearce and his subsequent wives (he had six in total), often demanded oral sex from female patients and domestic help. Members were inspired to regress to childhood and recoup missing stages of development. For a couple of summers in Amagansett, where the leaders built a summer residence, men and women walked around sucking on pacifiers, carrying stuffed animals and meting out martinis from baby bottles.

In the meantime, the actual children suffered to varying degrees, routinely outsourced to babysitters or sent away to boarding schools, some terrible. The development of DNA tests revealed hitherto unknown biological relationships, providing, Stille writes, “as many twists and turns as the end of a Dickens novel in which mistaken identities are clarified and long-lost foundlings are reunited with their parents.”(Though some members never got to reconcile with estranged birth families.)

What hastened the end? A 1986 article by Joe Conason in The Village Voice. Lawsuits brewing faster than Sanka. And defectors, including one mother refused time with her child, who’d become known as “the contras.”

“The Sullivanians” is a fascinating study of group dynamics and a highly competent historical account. Its only flaw, narratively speaking, is that this key party of self-actualizers features no particular cheerable hero or heroine — only survivors with varying degrees of rue, blinking as the light of hindsight intensifies.


THE SULLIVANIANS: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune | By Alexander Stille | 418 pp. | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $30

Alexandra Jacobs is a book critic and the author of “Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch.” @AlexandraJacobs





https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/18/books/review/the-sullivanians-alexander-stille.html

The Fourth Wall Review: A Provocative, Must-See Documentary

GREG ARCHER

Movieweb
June 17, 2023

In The Fourth Wall, the son of a famous cult leader investigates the group he was raised inside of, uncovering long-buried secrets along the way.

People have long been fascinated with cults. Long before humans spent countless hours on TikTok and Instagram, there were bold headlines that captured our attention. (Remember newspapers?) Back in the late 1960s, cult figure Charles Manson emerged. In the 1970s, there was psyched-out Father Yod and slippery Jim Jones. In the 1990s, Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret raised eyebrows with their doomsday cult, and Marshall Applewhite single-handedly orchestrated a mass suicide in conjunction with a comet.

Hollywood never really shied away from attempting to capture these stories. From 1973’s Manson to the more current The Invitation and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, audiences were glued to the screen. Heck, the upcoming film The Resurrection of Charles Manson starring Frank Grillo (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) is bound to intrigue.

But there’s something truly fascinating, and even necessary, about the new documentary series The Fourth Wall, which recently debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival. In an era filled with divisiveness, opinion news, and extreme political polarization, director Luke Meyer (Darkon, Breaking a Monster) and collaborator Keith Newton have created a must-see endeavor regardless of ideology.

The Fourth Wall boldly and effectively shines the spotlight on the Sullivanians, New York City’s secretive “psychotherapy sex cult” that was hidden in plain sight on Manhattan's Upper West Side in the ’70s and ‘80s. Helmed by founder Saul Newton, it flourished until its dramatic collapse in 1991. Honing in on Keith Newton’s past ties to the group when he was a child, the duo does more than just uncover long-hidden secrets. They create an opportunity to witness both the resilience and the fragility of human beings — and their psyches.

The Fourth Wall Will Blow You Away

“The nuclear family is the root of all evil.” That was Saul Newton’s modus operandi. The enigmatic figure believed that other people should be raising your kids. No doubt, he pointed the finger at how many adults found themselves in therapy, working through their mommy and daddy issues at the time. The Fourth Wall captures the impetus of The Sullivanians with a shrewd eye and a hell of a lot of grace.

You see, Keith Newton, the writer and executive producer of The Fourth Wall, is the son of founder Saul Newton. His mother, Helen, a Sullivanian, is interviewed in the film as well, along with many others involved with the cult at the time — from adults who were children at the time, to older adults who reflect on how everything went down.

Keith Newton’s personal connection to the project give audiences to root for. We want to know how things came to be and how Keith Newton managed to find balance and stability in his adult life. He credits the birth of his daughter, to some degree, noting how he couldn’t imagine his daughter being taken out of his care. But it’s the man’s earnestness, curiosity, and his heart you see him wearing on his sleeve that engages viewers. His mission: to expose the truth.

Saul Newton died at 85 in 1991, the year the cult tanked. The group’s history has never been told in this fashion. Rich in detail and full of balanced reporting, it goes beyond traditional cult-narrative tales and leans into the emotional aftermath for both victims and perpetrators. Exposing the guilt, shame, trauma, and, ultimately, healing of everybody involved creates one of the compelling documentaries to experience this year.

Personal Tales Elevate the Documentary

In The Fourth Wall, “intimate and exclusive” access to former members, therapists, and children of the group capture a story whose ripple effects stretch throughout the decades. “It was perverse that he was lecturing anybody on being psychologically healthy,” one former member notes of Saul Newton in the documentary. We’re told he was married six times and that when he tired of one wife, moved onto another while the “exes” remained in the group.

“Saul was an ‘idea,” another former Sullivanian revealed. “He was figuring out what your weak points were and going after them.” Meanwhile, another group member said: “[Saul] was brilliant scary, a street fighter, a warrior, a gang leader — he had that type of mentality.” He also has people right where he wanted them — in his control.

Keith Newton’s fascination with his past, his father’s influence, and how it affected him and others drives this project. It’s both eerie and fascinating to learn of the theater company the group formed and why. Facts, talking heads, and archival images fill the screen with intention and purpose in this winning documentary. It’s astounding. It’s frightening.

Meanwhile, there’s some fodder on how the group got is name — from prominent psychiatrist Henry Stack Sullivan. We’re also taken back to 1957, when Saul Newton and Dr. Jane Pearce, his wife, drifted away from the Sullivan-based William Alanson White Institute to form their own spectacle. Eventually, there were reports of Newton and Pearce distorting Sullivan’s original ideas. The filmmakers are valiant and successful in their attempts to capture all this with great care.

It’s fitting, too, that the press was privy to some of director Luke Meyer’s past and why this project meant so much to him — as a child, he was part of a guru-led meditation ashram, and experienced his own fringe childhood. Ultimately, these filmmakers illuminate the dire depths of the Sullivanians' psychological violence. And yet… there’s hope, pretty glimmers woven into the deeply human tapestry of The Fourth Wall. This is the documentary series to watch this year.

The Fourth Wall, currently at Tribeca Film Festival, is a SeeThink Films & Submarine Deluxe production.

https://movieweb.com/the-fourth-wall-review/

 

The Upper West Side Cult That Hid in Plain Sight

In the sixties and seventies, the Sullivanian Institute had a winning sales pitch for young New Yorkers: parties, sex, low rent, and affordable therapy.

Jessica Winter
The New Yorker
June 14, 2023

Cults thrive in isolation, and this poses a challenge for the urban cult leader. Jim Jones, of the Peoples Temple, exerted an unsettling degree of influence on San Francisco politics of the late nineteen-seventies but was eventually forced to flee to his doomed jungle outpost in Guyana. Charles Manson made halting inroads in the late-sixties Los Angeles music scene while his Family hunkered down on the fifty-five-acre Spahn Movie Ranch. Scientology has prominent real-estate holdings in major cities across the world, but its élite management unit, the Sea Org, was originally intended to operate in international waters, in order to evade government and media scrutiny.

At its peak, in the mid- to late seventies, the psychoanalytic association known as the Sullivanian Institute had as many as six hundred patient-members clustered in apartment buildings that the group bought or rented on the cheap on Manhattan's Upper West Side. They also ran an experimental theatre troupe, called the Fourth Wall, on the Lower East Side. The Sullivanians adhered to the same principles and traditions as many of the ashrams and rural intentional communities of the era: polyamory, communal living, group parenting, socialist politics. But they came to their belief system through the gateway of psychoanalysis, the self-actualization tool of the urbane intellectual. And they enacted their beliefs on a crowded concrete island of nearly eight million people, often while holding down high-status jobs as physicians, attorneys, computer programmers, and academics. The institute's co-founder and reigning tyrant, Saul Newton, who sat atop the organization from the mid-nineteen-fifties until the mid-nineteen-eighties (he died in 1991), may have come closer than any of his far more notorious peers to establishing a truly metropolitan cult—its members visible but its practices obscure.

The son of Russian Jews who immigrated to Canada, Newton was combative and mercurial, a onetime communist labor organizer who had fought in the Spanish Civil War. He had no medical degree or psychoanalytic training, but one of his wives, Jane Pearce, trained under the renowned American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, one of the pioneers of interpersonal analysis. Sullivan, who died in 1949, eschewed the Freudian paradigm of the therapist as a blank screen; the interpersonal analyst might find opportunities to make reciprocal conversation with patients or even offer advice. Newton and Pearce pushed this more interventionist model in an aggressive, authoritarian direction when they co-founded the Sullivanian Institute, in 1957. As Alexander Stille writes in his juicy, fascinating "The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune," Sullivanian therapists became "the chief authorities in a patient's life," and their forceful guidance reflected Newton and Pearce's antipathy toward conventions such as monogamy and filial piety. (Newton's Times obituary dryly noted, "Most mental health experts view the Newton group as having distorted Mr. Sullivan's name and theories.")

The Sullivanians' bête noire was the nuclear family, which they identified as the wellspring of all human pathology. To shake off bourgeois norms, Sullivanian patients lived with same-sex roommates and cultivated close platonic friendships, replete with tween-style sleepovers. They had lots of (hetero)sexual partners—in fact, turning down most any sexual proposition from a group member was frowned upon. But they were not allowed to form steady romantic relationships. To a Sullivanian, Stille explains, sexual jealousy was "a by-product of a capitalist mentality that saw marriage and monogamy as a form of ownership." (Jackson Pollock, an early Sullivanian patient, was a fan of the method in part because he could cheat on his wife.) Higher-ups prodded Sullivanians to renounce their parents and other blood relatives; one member ceased contact with her twelve-year-old sister because the girl stopped going to therapy. Women had to seek permission to get pregnant. While trying to conceive, they would have sex with multiple men, in order to create ambiguity about their child's biological father. Newton, for his part, did not lead by example—Pearce was his fourth wife, and there was no uncertainty about the paternity of Newton's ten children. Wives No. 5 and 6, Joan Harvey and Helen Moses, were also therapists, whom Newton installed as top lieutenants in the Sullivanian enterprise.

The exact appeal of a cult can be impenetrable to outsiders, and even to its ex-members. But, in the sixties and seventies, the Sullivanian Institute had a winning sales pitch for young New Yorkers: parties, sex, low rent, and affordable therapy. (Therapists at the institute were also willing to write letters to the draft board on behalf of patients who were "psychologically unfit" to serve in the war in Vietnam—a powerful recruitment tool for the group.) "Everyone was friends with everyone else—dozens of young people in a handful of nearby buildings—in and out of one another's apartments, playing music, having parties," Stille writes. The novelist Richard Price, who was a creative-writing student at Columbia when he became involved in the group, in 1972, told Stille, "It felt to me like this is just: add water and it's instant friends. And you know, girls are going in and out. . . . It's instant sex life." Suddenly, Price went on, "it's like somebody opened the gates of heaven."

As in many places mistaken for heaven, the guy at the top mistook himself for God. Newton's bulldozing megalomania helped to secure the Sullivanian Institute's initial success and also insured its collapse. By the nineteen-eighties, Newton and his top therapists had demoniac control over their patients' sex lives, social lives, how they earned or spent money (much of their income was swallowed up in dues, fines, and "assessments" owed to the institute), and how they raised—or, usually, didn't raise—their children. The idyllic commune was overrun by snakes and pestilence: financial exploitation, physical and sexual abuse, child neglect, and mushrooming paranoia. In Stille's view, "the Sullivanian Institute encapsulates one of the great themes of the twentieth century: the tendency of utopian projects of social liberation to take a totalitarian turn."

In "The Dialectic of Sex," from 1970, the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone imagined abolishing the patriarchal nuclear family, "a form of social organization that intensifies the worst effects of inequality inherent in the biological family itself," she wrote. She saw a future in which children could be gestated artificially—outside of a human womb—and raised communally. These technological and cultural advancements, Firestone believed, would help guarantee greater freedom and autonomy for women and children alike. Women would be excused from the reproductive obligations—pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, caregiving—that subordinated them to men's power, and children would be spared the Oedipal neuroses that the nuclear family tends to imprint.

Firestone did not romanticize mothers or motherhood. The bond between a woman and her child, she wrote, was a breeding ground for anxiety and neediness, a mere "alliance of the oppressed." The Sullivanians went further: they cast the mother herself as the oppressor. "The Conditions of Human Growth," a book co-authored by Newton and Pearce, and published in 1963, depicted early motherhood as "an unmitigated nightmare," Stille writes, "a kind of death trap from which both parent and child needed to be liberated," in which the child is conditioned to muffle her own needs and desires in order to placate her overwhelmed, soon enraged mother. (Under Sullivanian analysis, Jackson Pollock took to referring to his mother as "that old womb with a built-in tomb.") The couple's ideas likely had autobiographical underpinnings. Newton's mother, Stille writes, was embittered and domineering, while Pearce had suffered bouts of severe postpartum depression.

These ideas about mothers and families were also shared by some of the most prominent public intellectuals of the time in the fields of psychiatry and psychology. In the mid-sixties, the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing declared that mothers conflate love with violence and likened the nuclear family both to a gas chamber and to a racketeering ring, one that produced "the frightened, cowed, abject creature that we are admonished to be, if we are to be normal—offering each other mutual protection from our own violence." The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, an Austrian-born survivor of Dachau and Buchenwald, compared the mothers of autistic children to Nazi prison guards.

The Sullivanian framework militated against the dangers posed by the mother by limiting her time with her children, even in their infancy. Babysitters did most of the caregiving, and kids not yet old enough to read were packed off to grim boarding schools where physical and sexual abuse were rampant. Two of the more unbearable episodes in "The Sullivanians" involve the hapless Deedee Agee, the daughter of the writer James Agee. In 1974, at the recommendation of her Sullivanian therapist, Agee sent her son Teddy, age five, to boarding school; when Teddy's father took the miserable boy to come live with him instead, Agee and a few Sullivanian comrades sneaked into his house, snatched the boy, and dumped him back at his dreaded school. After the birth of another son, David, in 1983, Agee was placed under harsh surveillance by her housemates; when the baby did the usual baby things, like cry or spit up, it was held as evidence that Agee was manipulating the child to need her. At one point, Newton decreed that Agee could nurse David for only seven minutes per breast. Agee eventually extracted herself from this perpetual struggle session with some strategic inveigling of Helen Moses, Newton's final wife, and of Newton himself, then seventy-seven, who was sufficiently flattered by Agee's supplications that he began having sex with her.

We blame everything on mothers, and quite often for good reason. (As Carmela Soprano once said to Livia Soprano, "You know the power that you have and you use it like a pro. . . . You are bigger than life. You are his mother.") If something goes wrong with the child, the mother will loom large, either for her presence or her absence. What the Sullivanian approach neglected to acknowledge, though, was that if you sever a child's ties to their parents, an equally destructive parent manqué—whether it's Saul Newton or the poorly trained staff at a squalid boarding school—might fill the void. They fuck you up, your mum and dad, but almost anyone will do.

"The Sullivanians" is disjointed and sometimes repetitive, and it probably takes too many liberties in reconstructing word-for-word hearsay quotations dating back forty years or more. This is not a sleek or felicitous work, but it scarcely matters when so much of the reporting is this good, the story this pulpy and bizarre, the human behavior on display so appalling. Like all cult leaders, Newton ignored his own principles when it suited him, while taking others to sadistic extremes, such as the Sullivanian commitment to free love. He demanded oral sex from seemingly every young woman he encountered, in or out of session, hounding one young patient, Ellen, on a near-daily basis for almost twenty years. And, like all violent patriarchs, Newton triggered cycles of abuse across and down generations. Ellen matured into one of the institute's most awful therapists, at one point urging a teen-ager who had overslept her alarm to kill herself. When a rank-and-file Sullivanian named Marice Pappo gave birth to her daughter, Jessica, in 1985, and instantly fell under the same constraints and condemnations that Deedee Agee had suffered, Agee was one of the loudest voices attacking her.

By that point, the Sullivanian Institute was splintering under the weight of defections, custody battles, negative media attention, and investigations into professional misconduct. At least four of the group's therapists, including Joan Harvey and Helen Moses, lost their licenses. Adult children of the cult began connecting with one another to share the detective work of tracking down biological fathers and siblings, which made for "a strange and ironic ending to the story of a group that had set out to dismantle the nuclear family," Stille writes. His book demonstrates that, in destroying the family, the Sullivanians also replicated its ugliest dynamics: Newton as the tyrannical father, his therapist-wives as the enabling mothers, and the lower-ranking patients as their terrified children, scrambling for their unattainable approval.

Estrangement is a commonplace in such fractured families; enforced estrangement from both the blood family and the outside world is a common tool of control in cults. The curse of the Sullivanian experience was that estrangement was essential to the project and yet impossible. There you were, living in the same apartment as the person whom you slept with but weren't allowed to love, the children whom you'd borne but couldn't raise. ♦



https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-upper-west-side-cult-that-hid-in-plain-sight

Why Are We Suddenly All Obsessed With Cults?

Cults seem a distant, almost historical phenomena – but according to author Beth Lewis, that couldn't be further from the truth.

Beth Lewis
Huffpost
June 10, 2023

Cults are fertile ground for endless documentaries, movies, TV shows, books, so much so that there seems to be a new Netflix show about one every month. But why?

Our fascination with cults comes from the same place as our fascination with serial killers and true crime, we love to gawk at the extremes of humanity from a safe space behind a TV screen or page of a book and think, that could never happen to me.

These cult leaders become macabre celebrities. Charles Manson. David Koresh. Keith Raniere. It’s incredible to think these leaders have brainwashed thousands of people into giving everything they have to one person under the guise of a community.

In some cases, these cults do actually create entire communities by themselves.

Rajneeshpurum was a city built in Oregon, US by the Rajneesh movement led by Bagwhan Shree Rajneesh (otherwise known as Osho). The hit Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country details their rise, expansion, and collapse, including the largest instance of domestic bioterrorism in the USA.

For a writer, it’s hard to resist the pull of a cult narrative and for viewers, hard to not binge just one more episode, especially when the cult in question features recognisable faces.

NXIVM is one of the most talked about cults of the moment. It has so gripped the world that, since its demise in 2018, a record number of documentaries, movies, books, and podcasts have been made about it. The Vow and Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult are the two most popular docuseries and give different perspectives on the cult. Both do, however, mention the leader Keith Raniere’s strange obsession with late-night volleyball.

What began as a self-improvement MLM (multi-level marketing system, a modern equivalent of a pyramid scheme and classic fronting for cults) ended with FBI raids, arrests and a 120-year prison sentence for Raniere.

NXIVM wanted to be the new Scientology and Keith Raniere the new David Miscavige, with all the power, money and influence that would bring. Like Scientology, NXIVM had secret manuals, exclusive sub-groups, collections of ‘collateral’, and of course celebrity members.

Celebrities lend credibility to cults and aid in recruitment, and with NXIVM that came from Alison Mack. She played Chloe Sullivan in Smallville and used her status to recruit women into DOS, a secret group Mack touted as a ‘feminist empowerment group’ but in reality was a master/slave sex group for Raniere.

The price of entry was extreme. Members had to hand over embarrassing or incriminating materials and most shockingly, be branded with a symbol made from Raniere and Mack’s initials.

NXIVM tried to recruit from the upper echelons of Hollywood. Rosario Dawson, Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler are said to have taken classes but didn’t stay. With the exception of Mack, NXIVM had little in the way of Hollywood clout. It was without its Tom Cruise.

But Cruise, of course, has his own cult. Alongside a host of Hollywood stars (John Travolta, Elizabeth Moss, Giovanni Ribisi to name a few), Cruise is the face of Scientology. There have, of course, been dozens of documentaries about Scientology but Going Clear is probably the best. I couldn’t resist a nod to this in my novel, Children of the Sun. My main character, a reporter, finds photographs of a cult leader beside well-known figures, including a not-so-veiled version of Cruise.

When it comes to cults, for me there is none more fascinating than Heaven’s Gate, who served as inspiration for the Golden Door Group in Children of the Sun. A recent documentary, Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults explored the group and its beliefs, trajectory, and ultimate end by mass suicide in 1997.

They were founded in 1974 by Bonnie Nettles and Marshall Applewhite. They were Star Trek fans and believed if they died they would ascend to live forever on a spaceship trailing behind the Hale-Bopp comet.

Heaven’s Gate didn’t follow the path of a traditional cult by continuing to expand, becoming more extreme and eventually imploding. In 1976 they stopped recruiting and lived a monastic lifestyle. No drugs, no sex, no recruitment. What kind of a cult was this?

Cults seem a distant, almost historical phenomena. But they aren’t. Right now, there is an extreme cult in Kenya where over 200 people have died by starvation, believing they would get to Heaven quicker.

Recently, via documentary A Very British Cult, The Lighthouse life-coaching group has been exposed as a dangerous cult. There even seems to be a new Hollywood cult on the rise. The Orgonite Society, comprised so it appears, of Kylie Jenner, Jaden and Willow Smith and some others, takes its teachings from a disgraced Austrian psychotherapist Dr Wilhelm Reich who was obsessed with crystals, energy balancing, and orgasms.

One hopes this is a group playing at being an enlightened society but many dangerous cults started innocently enough.

Regardless, I look forward to their Netflix documentary.

 

Beth Lewis’ latest novel, CHILDREN OF THE SUN, was published by Hodder Fiction in May 2023.

 

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/why-are-we-suddenly-all-obsessed-with-cults_uk_6481d381e4b04ee51a92f3ec

 

Books: The Sullivanians, The Cult That Hid in Plain Sight on the Upper West Side

Books: The Sullivanians, The Cult That Hid in Plain Sight on the Upper West Side


Anya Schiffrin
West Side Rag
May 28, 2023

My first job as a teenager on the Upper West Side was scooping ice cream at Ferguson’s on West 86th Street at Broadway, which turned out to be owned by EST, a cult whose celebrity followers included Yoko Ono and Diana Ross, according to The New York Times. I knew nothing about cults back then. But I remember that during my childhood, our family had acquaintances with an unusual living arrangement: they shared a large apartment with others who were all in therapy together. Strange, yes, but just how strange, we didn’t know at the time. Our acquaintances were part of the Upper West Side’s very own 1970s cult, with hundreds of people living together in two buildings: one on 314 West 91st Street, the other on 100th and Broadway. Now, a new book, The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, by Columbia Journalism School professor Alexander Stille, unlocks the secrets of that Upper West Side cult, sometimes known as the “Fourth Wall.”

The Sullivanians provides a startling, very detailed account of the damage wreaked by the group on many, particularly the children of cult members. Stille, who wrote for The New Yorker for many years, spent five years pursuing the Sullivanians, doing dozens of interviews and consulting thousands of pages of court records. His research on cults showed how they often begin as relatively harmless groups, until a powerful leader starts to demand more extreme behavior – such as encouraging men to have multiple affairs or to prey on younger women or girls. A recent New York example: the leader of the NXIVM cult marked his women followers with a brand, until he was arrested and convicted of a series of crimes, including sex trafficking.

The Sullivanian group was cofounded in New York in the 1950s by Saul Newton and his wife Jane Pearce. Pearce had been a student of neo-Freudian psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, whose name became attached to the group even though he died in 1949 before it formed.

The Sullivanians were professional therapists who came together and performed therapy on each other. They spent summers together in the Hamptons and founded a theater company called the Fourth Wall, initially on 77 East 4th Street.

But as time passed, Newton began to push the idea that families were a destructive force, including families among the Sullivanians. He promoted divorce, free love, and an emphasis on personal growth over family values. Men had wide freedom to pursue sexual relations, while women were subordinated and pressured to send their children to boarding schools, as early as age three. Some ended up in abusive institutions. Yet the group’s leaders kept their own children in private schools in the city, with financing provided by the other cult members.

Below is a lightly edited email interview with Stille about the Sullivanians. Spoiler alert: the last part of the interview explains how the cult disintegrated.

Q: Can you explain how the Sullivanians became a cult? How did it evolve?

STILLE: The Sullivan Institute began as a maverick form of psychotherapy. Its founders, Jane Pearce and Saul Newton, believed that people grew from contact with a variety of other people, so traditional institutions like the nuclear family and monogamous marriage were antithetical to growth. By the 1960s, they were advising them to live in large group apartments on the Upper West Side: men with men and women with women, so that people would not form traditional family units but would have multiple sexual relationships.

Jane Pearce, who was both an M.D. and had extensive psychoanalytic training at the William Alanson White Institute, which Harry Stack Sullivan and other major neo-Freudians had founded in the 1940s, believed this approach was a path to human liberation. Pearce did not intend to found a cult. But her very “directive” form of therapy – telling patients what they should do and isolating them from past family and friends – were techniques straight out of the cult playbook.

Her husband, Saul Newton, (who later divorced Pearce and excluded her from the group), had no formal training in psychotherapy but quickly learned this approach gave him power over his patients. Even in the 1960s, being a Sullivanian patient meant being part of an exclusive community with clear rules that organized people’s lives. It became more cult-like in the 1970s. When members of the group formed a theater company, The Fourth Wall, the leadership realized that it could create a formal membership with people paying dues and undertaking large, collective projects. The theater was a great vehicle for power and control, and the leaders took it over.

Q: What do you think was the most pernicious part of their society?

STILLE: The most pernicious element of the group was the coercive nature of the therapy, therapists taking control over every aspect of their patients’ lives and convincing patients that if they didn’t go along with directives, that they would be kicked out of the group and that their lives would be ruined. Because patients had cut all ties with their families and past friends, the idea of ostracism became terrifying to them.

This meant, for example, that many patients who had small children were convinced to send their kids to boarding school – at ages of five, six, seven – with often catastrophic effect on the children – and the parents. The therapy also undermined people’s sense of self and agency, convincing them that their own natural inclinations and judgment could not be trusted because it had been shaped and corrupted by their terrible families and by a stultifying bourgeois society. Patients grew by doing things that made you anxious and that you resisted doing. So, if a woman didn’t want to have sex with someone, they should [anyway], precisely because you didn’t want to.

Q: Was this a hard book to write?

STILLE: The world of the Sullivanians was deeply private and somewhat hard to break into. At the same time, I found some remarkable people who were generous and open, which allowed me to make serious inroads into that community. I was able to contact and interview a larger swath of the former group members, track down the kids who had been sent away to boarding school. Some people who initially said they didn’t want to be interviewed wrote back six months later and asked if I was still interested in talking with them.

The group created a powerful culture of silence and mafia-like omertà around the group’s life, which is still quite real for many ex-members. Some people responded by saying, “[T]his was the most traumatic period of my life and I don’t want to talk about it.” For others there was quite a bit of guilt and shame around their experience. Many of them told me: “I still don’t quite understand how I could have gone along with all of this, allowed myself to be treated that way.” But a surprising number overcame that resistance and spoke with me with surprising candor. I liked most of the people I met, people who were, almost universally, smart, thoughtful and kind. The central mystery of this project, for me, is how the leadership was able to get so many smart and not-crazy people to turn their lives inside out, in ways that are hard to understand.

Q: How did it end?

STILLE: People who had joined in their early twenties got tired, by their mid-thirties, of having their relationships broken up by therapists who demanded they stop “focusing” on one person and instead maintain multiple relationships. Many left in order to marry and pursue a more traditional family life. There are dozens of ex-Sullivanian married couples.

Women members who joined in their twenties, by their mid-thirties wanted to have children and resented the group’s heavy-handed interference with parent-child relationships. In 1986, a 41-year-old woman named Marice Pappo kidnapped her own child off the street at Broadway and [West] 100th Street because her therapists had denied her access to her infant daughter for six months. She consulted a lawyer who told her that as a mother she had a right to her child and should hire a couple of bodyguards and snatch the child when she went out for a morning walk with her babysitter, who was the adult in charge of looking after the daughter. All this right in front of the building at 2643 Broadway where Marice and about 90 Sullivanians all lived.

This marked a turning point, setting off a legal battle. Two other parents who had left the group also sued for custody of their kids. These battles split the group, led to multiple defections, drained it of economic resources. And, at the same time, the founder, Saul Newton began to suffer from obvious signs of dementia in the late 1980s and died in 1991, the year in which the group formally disbanded and began to sell off its assets.

The Sullivanians: Sex, Pyschotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, by Alexander Stille, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux June 20.

Anya Schiffrin is a lifelong Upper West Sider and senior lecturer at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.



https://www.westsiderag.com/2023/05/28/books-the-sullivanians-the-cult-that-hid-in-plain-sight-on-the-upper-west-side

CultNEWS101 Articles: 3/8/2023 (LDS, Ammon Bundy, Legal, FLDS, Sullivan Institute, Amish )

LDS, Ammon Bundy, Legal, FLDS, Sullivan Institute, Amish 

Forbes: Mormon Church Will Pay Millions In SEC Settlement Over Investment Portfolio Allegedly Saving For 'Second Coming Of Christ'

"The federal Securities and Exchange Commission charged the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints on Tuesday for violating federal tax laws, after a whistleblower revealed the church had allegedly deceived donors into raising money for a massive fund that has never been touched."

Idaho Statesman: Idaho health system wants Ammon Bundy held in contempt of court, seeks $7.5 million in damages

"St. Luke's Health System has filed paperwork asking an Ada County judge to consider holding far-right leader Ammon Bundy in contempt of court — again.

In court documents filed by Holland & Hart attorney Erik Stidham, St. Luke's alleged that Bundy violated Fourth District Judge Lynn Norton's protective order by failing to remove "defamatory statements" on the People's Rights Network — a far-right group started by Bundy — about St. Luke's President and CEO Chris Roth.

"A finding of contempt are needed here as Bundy disregards and disrespects the court and continues to disrupt plaintiff's lives and livelihoods," according to the memorandum. "Absent a finding of contempt, there is no doubt that Bundy will continue to defy the court."

in what he called a "peace offering." He's previously gone to trial twice for trespassing charges in 2021 and 2022.

Stidham in the memorandum alleged that Bundy violated the protective order by falsely posting on the People's Rights Network that Roth is a criminal accessory of child abduction."

Law and Crime: Polygamist cult leader and self-proclaimed prophet 'brazenly' used jailhouse phone system to have 'sexual discussions' with kids: Feds

"Polygamous cult leader Sam Bateman, a self-proclaimed prophet awaiting trial on kidnapping and other charges, "brazenly" used the jailhouse phone system to "engage in sexual discussions with children," federal prosecutors allege.

One of the girls, identified in court papers as "Jane Doe 4," is a 13-year-old he allegedly conspired to kidnap, court papers say."

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

"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 reveal the nearly unbelievable story of a fallen utopia in the heart of New York City.

Only In Your State: The Tiny Amish Town In Iowa That's The Perfect Day Trip Destination

" ... In the communities surrounding Bloomfield, you'll find the largest, most conservative Amish community in Iowa. The Davis County Amish are a storied community, and they welcome visitors into their world. A visit to this community is a fascinating look at a lifestyle that feels completely foreign to us in the contemporary moment."

The Davis County Amish have been here for generations, and the tight-knit group still even speaks German."

News, Education, Intervention, Recovery

CultEducationEvents.com

CultMediation.com   

Intervention101.com to help families and friends understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one's cult involvement.

CultRecovery101.com assists group members and their families make the sometimes difficult transition from coercion to renewed individual choice.

CultNEWS101.com news, links, resources.

Facebook

Flipboard

Twitter

Instagram

Cults101.org resources about cults, cultic groups, abusive relationships, movements, religions, political organizations and related topics.

Selection of articles for CultNEWS101 does not mean that Patrick Ryan or Joseph Kelly agree with the content. We provide information from many points of view in order to promote dialogue.

Please forward articles that you think we should add to cultintervention@gmail.com.

The Sullivanians - Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune

Author: 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.

https://www.amazon.com/Sullivanians-Psychotherapy-Wild-American-Commune/dp/0374600392

Inside the Rise & Fall of A 1970s Upper West Side Cult

September 21, 2016
Gothamist
Jake Offenhartz in Arts & Entertainment

On the evening of July 29th, 1985, members of a mysterious group called the Sullivan Institute broke into and terrorized an apartment at 100th Street and Broadway. Dressed in dark colors and stocking caps, some beat the tenants with sticks, while others slit open mattresses and smashed the sink, toilet, and television set. It was a coordinated revenge attack, intended to send a message to the group’s neighbors, who allegedly started the drama by spilling paint on the institute’s wall.

After the raid, the pillagers returned to their seven-story co-op at 2643 Broadway. “We were prepared for them to invade,” says Paul Sprecher, a member of the Sullivan Institute for over a decade. “We had security down at the front door to make sure they would be duly chastised. I don’t remember, I think one guy showed up to complain and he was manhandled.” (According to a 1989 New York Magazine article, the complaining tenant was “beaten by more than a dozen members,” one of whom “broke four knuckles punching the young boy in the face.”)

The paint splatter that started the ordeal is still visible today, on the brick wall just above the Metro Diner on 100th and Broadway. It is perhaps the last physical reminder of a psychotherapy cult—informally known as the “Sullivanians”—that once had 500 members living in three buildings on the Upper West Side.

Sprecher, who now works as Unitarian minister, tells me over the phone that he prefers the term “high demand group,” though he’s willing to admit the group had “a lot of hallmarks of a cult.”

For one, there was the chimerical leader, Saul B. Newton, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who founded the Sullivan Research Institute in 1957 with his wife, Dr. Jane Pearce. A Marxist with no formal training as a therapist, Newton sought to create an alternative to the traditional nuclear family, which he viewed as the root cause of social anxiety. The institute—part therapy center, part polyamorous commune—began attracting members in the late 1960s, many of them well-known artists and intellectuals, including writer Richard Price and singer Judy Collins. Jackson Pollock was also a proto-member—according to his biography, he started seeing Ralph Klein for therapy in 1955. Klein was a close friend of Newton's, and would go on to become a leader of the group.

Sprecher, a recent Harvard graduate seeking roommates in a new city, joined the institute in 1974, almost by accident. “I found this group and it just so happened that all of them were in Sullivanian therapy,” he says. “It was this incredibly neat experience for a newcomer in New York City. Suddenly I had a social life. There were women who wanted to date me. We spent the summer in Amagansett. It was very loose in those days, just people hanging out in apartments.”

The purpose of the group, as pitched to Sprecher and others, was to expand on the revolutionary promise of the 1960s. Members would find a social circle of likeminded people—mostly well-educated, secular, leftist, and Jewish—committed to a brand of psychotherapy imbued with radical politics and sexual liberation. “The therapists did not regard therapeutic boundaries with any respect at all,” says Sprecher. “Everyone slept with everyone.”

While he now recognizes that many of those relationships crossed a line, Sprecher didn’t think anything of it at the time. “We created a living context like a tiny village that was mostly cut off from the world. The bizarre thing, of course, is that you’re in the middle of New York City, but the dynamics of control and so on are like a village.”

Despite the seemingly lax nature, this village still had plenty of rules. Most members lived in sex-segregated apartments on the Upper West Side, where they were forbidden from engaging in exclusive relationships, unless approved by Newton. Children born in the group were shipped off to boarding school or given to caretakers, with their parents only allowed to visit for an hour or two a day. In mandated weekly sessions, therapists advised patients to cut off all contact with outside friends and relatives, except when in need of money. It took only a few months in therapy for Sprecher to sever his relationship with his parents.

As ranks swelled in the mid-'70s, the group took on an increasingly authoritarian nature, even as they expanded into new ventures. Many attribute the shift to the departure of Dr. Pearce and the arrival of Newton’s second wife, Joan Harvey, a soap opera actor and aspiring stage director. It was Harvey’s idea to merge the therapy group with a politically progressive theatre collective called the Fourth Wall. In 1978, the budding troupe signed a lease at the Truck and Warehouse Theatre in the East Village (at 77 East 4th Street). When the previous company refused to vacate the theatre, hundreds of Sullivanians took over the space and destroyed their sets, leading to three arrests.

“All of the members were invited to come down and occupy the theatre. The cops came in the middle of the night and we had barricaded the doors. It was very exciting,” recalls Sprecher. “Saul wanted to teach people how to stand up to cops. He liked that kind of confrontation.”

The leadership’s tendencies for erratic behavior finally came to a head in 1979. Following the partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the group migrated en masse to Orlando, Florida, to await the destruction of Manhattan. When the 250 or so members returned to New York a few weeks later, things were different. Anyone who didn’t go on the trip was ostracized by Newton, and members who publicly spoke of the incident could be kicked out. “This was the moment that the Fourth Wall smashed closed,” says Sprecher. “It was very scary.”

Mike Bray joined the Sullivan Institute in 1972, on the recommendation of a fellow classmate in Fordham’s clinical psychology program. Within two years, Bray divorced his wife, cut off contact with his parents, and moved into one of the Upper West Side apartment buildings, where he would remain until 1985.

After the Three Mile Island incident, he tells me over the phone, “paranoid beliefs and distortions of reality began to set in,” particularly among Saul Newton and Joan Harvey. The group had recently acquired a resort in the Catskills, where Bray was soon dispatched to build a “secret, steel lined room with quarter inch plates so that Joan Harvey could edit her film” without interference from the CIA. Bray didn’t buy into the surveillance panic, but he remembers deriving a sense of purpose from the mission. “There was the technical manpower of succeeding at this task, subsumed under this desire to be approved of,” he says. “It was a suspension of critical thinking.”

Another one of his jobs was to oversee the fleet of school buses and motorcycles, which the group kept in case of some dire emergency. “We had a very planned out escape route that involved walking to the George Washington bridge,” he says. “In terms of the leadership’s children, it meant putting them in backpacks and then riding them out in off-road motorcycles, which we had about six of.” At this point, the group owned approximately $12 million in property, including the Catskills resort, a house in Vermont, and two buildings on the Upper West Side (the third was a rental). This wealth came directly from members, who were instructed to contribute most of their money for the benefit of the group.

As the leadership grew more powerful, they also became more controlling. “The therapists tried in some cases to control people's relationships romantically,” remembers Amy Siskind, a member of the group for 21 years, beginning when she was 13. “They wanted to control whether I had children. They wanted to control who I was with.”

She recalls being frightened by Newton, whose violent tendencies only escalated in the ‘80s as he began exhibiting signs of dementia. “He had this idea of how to deal with people who were against you. And his idea was basically intimidation and violence,” she says. “There were many incidents throughout the history of the group of intimidation.”

One such incident involved Siskind’s current husband and former therapist, Michael Cohen, who attempted to leave the group in 1985. As Cohen would later testify in court, two Sullivanians—one of them Newton’s son—tracked Cohen down and assaulted him in the Union Square subway stop. According to court documents, the pair dangled Cohen over the subway tracks and threatened to kill him.

Today, the two aggressors are successful New York professionals—one works for the New York Times, the other as a professor at Columbia. “No one ever was prosecuted for that,” says Siskind. “It would've been nice if they had been. It's too late now.”

The group began to crumble in late 1980s, as two custody suits filed by Michael Bray and Paul Sprecher brought public attention to the group's violent tendencies and controversial child-rearing practices. Newton’s death in 1991 marked an official end to the institute, though some claim that Joan Harvey and her husband Ralph Klein continued operating a similar community out of their home in New Rochelle.

With the exception of an academic book published by Amy Siskind in 2003, almost nothing has been written about the Sullivan Institute/Fourth Wall Community in the years following its dissolution. A few longtime residents of the neighborhood have vague memories of the group, but otherwise it’s been mostly forgotten. Most of the surviving ex-members are in their 60s or 70s by now, and are understandably wary of discussing this chapter of their lives.

The exception here is Eric Grunin, a self-described recluse who spent 12 years in the group, beginning in 1979. He has only positive memories of the experience and argues that, with rare exception, most others feel the same. “If you really wanna get a sense of what it's like,” he says, “you have to talk to the people who have no interest in talking to you.”

Of the half dozen people, I spoke with, Grunin is by far the most interested in talking. He is a fervent defender of the institute and scoffs at my use of the term cult. He also maintains a certain level of bitterness toward those who describe it in such terms. “Do I feel like Mike [Bray] particularly went over to the dark side?” he says, unprompted. “Yeah.” He has similarly harsh words for Siskind and Sprecher.

A few years ago, Grunin started a private Facebook group to connect with ex-members. He envisioned the page as place to post old photos and obituaries, and occasionally to plan meetups. Everything was going fine until someone started using the group to share bad memories of Joan Harvey. Grunin deleted the comment, igniting a firestorm.

“Some people said, ‘But you're censoring us,’ and I said, ‘start up your own group, it's easy.’ And this was important because half the people had something to complain about and went to the other group, and the other half didn't want to hear any of this, what they felt was stupid repudiated negativity. So the other group was there, and people yelled and screamed and bitched and moaned, and sometimes they had important things to say and mostly they just didn't.”

Grunin’s role as moderator, he tells me, is not unlike the minister who arrived in Salem during the aftermath of the witch trials. The village had divided into rival factions by then, a problem the new minister managed to solve by assigning the community members random seats within the church. “All of a sudden people started to calm down,” says Grunin. “They started to un-demonize each other and see each other as people again.”

It’s a confounding analogy, considering Grunin’s choices as moderator seem to have brought about more division, not less. But the idea of Facebook as a village is one that seems significant. In its own way, social media promises the same sense of community that attracted so many members to the Sullivan Institute, but without the rigid hierarchy that eventually brought the group’s destruction. A world where people can join and leave a group at the click of a button is probably not what these utopian dreamers once envisioned, but it’s at least a step in the right direction for individual freedom.

Before I get off the phone with Grunin, I ask him if a group like the Sullivanians could exist in New York again. “Of course it will happen again,” he replies. “People want that. People need alternatives.” On this last point, both Grunin and his enemies would seem to agree.

http://gothamist.com/2016/09/21/sullivanians_cult_nyc_history.php

Inside the Rise & Fall Of A 1970s Upper West Side Cult

Gothamist

BY JAKE OFFENHARTZ IN ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

SEP 21, 2016

 

On the evening of July 29th, 1985, members of a mysterious group called the Sullivan Institute broke into and terrorized an apartment at 100th Street and Broadway. Dressed in dark colors and stocking caps, some beat the tenants with sticks, while others slit open mattresses and smashed the sink, toilet, and television set. It was a coordinated revenge attack, intended to send a message to the group’s neighbors, who allegedly started the drama by spilling paint on the institute’s wall.

 

After the raid, the pillagers returned to their seven-story co-op at 2643 Broadway. “We were prepared for them to invade,” says Paul Sprecher, a member of the Sullivan Institute for over a decade. “We had security down at the front door to make sure they would be duly chastised. I don’t remember, I think one guy showed up to complain and he was manhandled.” (According to a 1989 New York Magazine article, the complaining tenant was “beaten by more than a dozen members,” one of whom “broke four knuckles punching the young boy in the face.”)

 

The paint splatter that started the ordeal is still visible today, on the brick wall just above the Metro Diner on 100th and Broadway. It is perhaps the last physical reminder of a psychotherapy cult—informally known as the “Sullivanians”—that once had 500 members living in three buildings on the Upper West Side.

 

Sprecher, who now works as Unitarian minister, tells me over the phone that he prefers the term “high demand group,” though he’s willing to admit the group had “a lot of hallmarks of a cult.”

For one, there was the chimerical leader, Saul B. Newton, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who founded the Sullivan Research Institute in 1957 with his wife, Dr. Jane Pearce. A Marxist with no formal training as a therapist, Newton sought to create an alternative to the traditional nuclear family, which he viewed as the root cause of social anxiety. The institute—part therapy center, part polyamorous commune—began attracting members in the late 1960s, many of them well-known artists and intellectuals, including writer Richard Price and singer Judy Collins. Jackson Pollock was also a proto-member—according to his biography, he started seeing Ralph Klein for therapy in 1955. Klein was a close friend of Newton's, and would go on to become a leader of the group.

 

Sprecher, a recent Harvard graduate seeking roommates in a new city, joined the institute in 1974, almost by accident. “I found this group and it just so happened that all of them were in Sullivanian therapy,” he says. “It was this incredibly neat experience for a newcomer in New York City. Suddenly I had a social life. There were women who wanted to date me. We spent the summer in Amagansett. It was very loose in those days, just people hanging out in apartments.”

 

The purpose of the group, as pitched to Sprecher and others, was to expand on the revolutionary promise of the 1960s. Members would find a social circle of likeminded people—mostly well-educated, secular, leftist, and Jewish—committed to a brand of psychotherapy imbued with radical politics and sexual liberation. “The therapists did not regard therapeutic boundaries with any respect at all,” says Sprecher. “Everyone slept with everyone.”

 

While he now recognizes that many of those relationships crossed a line, Sprecher didn’t think anything of it at the time. “We created a living context like a tiny village that was mostly cut off from the world. The bizarre thing, of course, is that you’re in the middle of New York City, but the dynamics of control and so on are like a village.”

 

Despite the seemingly lax nature, this village still had plenty of rules. Most members lived in sex-segregated apartments on the Upper West Side, where they were forbidden from engaging in exclusive relationships, unless approved by Newton. Children born in the group were shipped off to boarding school or given to caretakers, with their parents only allowed to visit for an hour or two a day. In mandated weekly sessions, therapists advised patients to cut off all contact with outside friends and relatives, except when in need of money. It took only a few months in therapy for Sprecher to sever his relationship with his parents.

 

As ranks swelled in the mid-'70s, the group took on an increasingly authoritarian nature, even as they expanded into new ventures. Many attribute the shift to the departure of Dr. Pearce and the arrival of Newton’s second wife, Joan Harvey, a soap opera actor and aspiring stage director. It was Harvey’s idea to merge the therapy group with a politically progressive theatre collective called the Fourth Wall. In 1978, the budding troupe signed a lease at the Truck and Warehouse Theatre in the East Village (at 77 East 4th Street). When the previous company refused to vacate the theatre, hundreds of Sullivanians took over the space and destroyed their sets, leading to three arrests.

 

“All of the members were invited to come down and occupy the theatre. The cops came in the middle of the night and we had barricaded the doors. It was very exciting,” recalls Sprecher. “Saul wanted to teach people how to stand up to cops. He liked that kind of confrontation.”

 

The leadership’s tendencies for erratic behavior finally came to a head in 1979. Following the partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the group migrated en masse to Orlando, Florida, to await the destruction of Manhattan. When the 250 or so members returned to New York a few weeks later, things were different. Anyone who didn’t go on the trip was ostracized by Newton, and members who publicly spoke of the incident could be kicked out. “This was the moment that the Fourth Wall smashed closed,” says Sprecher. “It was very scary.”

Mike Bray joined the Sullivan Institute in 1972, on the recommendation of a fellow classmate in Fordham’s clinical psychology program. Within two years, Bray divorced his wife, cut off contact with his parents, and moved into one of the Upper West Side apartment buildings, where he would remain until 1985.

 

After the Three Mile Island incident, he tells me over the phone, “paranoid beliefs and distortions of reality began to set in,” particularly among Saul Newton and Joan Harvey. The group had recently acquired a resort in the Catskills, where Bray was soon dispatched to build a “secret, steel lined room with quarter inch plates so that Joan Harvey could edit her film” without interference from the CIA. Bray didn’t buy into the surveillance panic, but he remembers deriving a sense of purpose from the mission. “There was the technical manpower of succeeding at this task, subsumed under this desire to be approved of,” he says. “It was a suspension of critical thinking.”

 

Another one of his jobs was to oversee the fleet of school buses and motorcycles, which the group kept in case of a some dire emergency. “We had a very planned out escape route that involved walking to the George Washington bridge,” he says. “In terms of the leadership’s children, it meant putting them in backpacks and then riding them out in off-road motorcycles, which we had about six of.” At this point, the group owned approximately $12 million in property, including the Catskills resort, a house in Vermont, and two buildings on the Upper West Side (the third was a rental). This wealth came directly from members, who were instructed to contribute most of their money for the benefit of the group.

 

As the leadership grew more powerful, they also became more controlling. “The therapists tried in some cases to control people's relationships romantically,” remembers Amy Siskind, a member of the group for 21 years, beginning when she was 13. “They wanted to control whether I had children. They wanted to control who I was with.”

 

She recalls being frightened by Newton, whose violent tendencies only escalated in the ‘80s as he began exhibiting signs of dementia. “He had this idea of how to deal with people who were against you. And his idea was basically intimidation and violence,” she says. “There were many incidents throughout the history of the group of intimidation.”

 

One such incident involved Siskind’s current husband and former therapist, Michael Cohen, who attempted to leave the group in 1985. As Cohen would later testify in court, two Sullivanians—one of them Newton’s son—tracked Cohen down and assaulted him in the Union Square subway stop. According to court documents, the pair dangled Cohen over the subway tracks and threatened to kill him.

 

Today, the two aggressors are successful New York professionals—one works for the New York Times, the other as a professor at Columbia. “No one ever was prosecuted for that,” says Siskind. “It would've been nice if they had been. It's too late now.”

 

The group began to crumble in late 1980s, as two custody suits filed by Michael Bray and Paul Sprecher brought public attention to the group's violent tendencies and controversial child-rearing practices. Newton’s death in 1991 marked an official end to the institute, though some claim that Joan Harvey and her husband Ralph Klein continued operating a similar community out of their home in New Rochelle.

 

With the exception of an academic book published by Amy Siskind in 2003, almost nothing has been written about the Sullivan Institute/Fourth Wall Community in the years following its dissolution. A few longtime residents of the neighborhood have vague memories of the group, but otherwise it’s been mostly forgotten. Most of the surviving ex-members are in their 60s or 70s by now, and are understandably wary of discussing this chapter of their lives.

 

The exception here is Eric Grunin, a self-described recluse who spent 12 years in the group, beginning in 1979. He has only positive memories of the experience and argues that, with rare exception, most others feel the same. “If you really wanna get a sense of what it's like,” he says, “you have to talk to the people who have no interest in talking to you.”

 

Of the half dozen people I spoke with, Grunin is by far the most interested in talking. He is a fervent defender of the institute and scoffs at my use of the term cult. He also maintains a certain level of bitterness toward those who describe it in such terms. “Do I feel like Mike [Bray] particularly went over to the dark side?” he says, unprompted. “Yeah.” He has similarly harsh words for Siskind and Sprecher.

 

A few years ago, Grunin started a private Facebook group to connect with ex-members. He envisioned the page as place to post old photos and obituaries, and occasionally to plan meetups. Everything was going fine until someone started using the group to share bad memories of Joan Harvey. Grunin deleted the comment, igniting a firestorm.

 

“Some people said, ‘But you're censoring us,’ and I said, ‘start up your own group, it's easy.’ And this was important because half the people had something to complain about and went to the other group, and the other half didn't want to hear any of this, what they felt was stupid repudiated negativity. So the other group was there, and people yelled and screamed and bitched and moaned, and sometimes they had important things to say and mostly they just didn't.”

 

Grunin’s role as moderator, he tells me, is not unlike the minister who arrived in Salem during the aftermath of the witch trials. The village had divided into rival factions by then, a problem the new minister managed to solve by assigning the community members random seats within the church. “All of a sudden people started to calm down,” says Grunin. “They started to un-demonize each other and see each other as people again.”

 

It’s a confounding analogy, considering Grunin’s choices as moderator seem to have brought about more division, not less. But the idea of Facebook as a village is one that seems significant. In its own way, social media promises the same sense of community that attracted so many members to the Sullivan Institute, but without the rigid hierarchy that eventually brought the group’s destruction. A world where people can join and leave a group at the click of a button is probably not what these utopian dreamers once envisioned, but it’s at least a step in the right direction for individual freedom.

 

Before I get off the phone with Grunin, I ask him if a group like the Sullivanians could exist in New York again. “Of course it will happen again,” he replies. “People want that. People need alternatives.” On this last point, both Grunin and his enemies would seem to agree.

 

http://gothamist.com/2016/09/21/sullivanians_cult_nyc_history.php