1 A Parallel World
Chris Pearce grew up in the loud silence of his own mysterious origins. Born in 1974, he lived in a handsome five-story town house on West Seventy-Seventh Street in New York, raised by Jane Pearce, an older woman already in her sixties when he was an infant. She had white hair and, after a bout with skin cancer, was missing part of her nose. He knew that Jane was not his biological mother, but no one explained how he had ended up with her or who his birth parents were.
Playing alone in his upstairs room, he filled the silence and his lack of knowledge with his own imagination. “Ever since I was little, I believed … I was raised by wolves, born from the earth, from the mist or the foam of the ocean like the Greek gods,” he later wrote in an animated film he made about his childhood.
In his teens, he learned that Jane was a well-known psychiatrist and cofounder of something called the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis and that the town house where he lived had been the institute’s headquarters for many years. In 1963, more than a decade before his birth, she and her then husband, Saul Newton, had published a book called The Conditions of Human Growth and had pioneered a maverick form of psychotherapy. Pearce and Newton believed that the nuclear family caused most psychological problems and that mothers inevitably squelched their children’s vitality. They founded a community of a few hundred people on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in which their patients lived together in large group apartments.
Jane had been a student of Harry Stack Sullivan, one of the pioneers of American neo-Freudian psychoanalysis, although Sullivan was no longer alive when she founded the institute in his name. Sullivan believed that people grew from their relationships with others—even in adulthood—and he treated people with schizophrenia by having them live together in a group setting. Jane Pearce took these ideas much further. She and Newton encouraged their patients to live in same-sex group apartments and to have multiple sexual partners so that they would continue to grow and not form and stagnate in stable couples and traditional families. Even patients who were married would live in separate apartments so that they would not remain trapped in exclusive relationships. The community she created was known in New York psychoanalytic circles as the Sullivanians, notorious for their unorthodox approach to analysis and the distinctive lifestyle that grew out of it. Along with believing that traditional families were bad for children, they also believed that a child’s biological inheritance was unimportant and that environment was everything. And so they encouraged patients to entrust the care of their children to babysitters, boarding schools, or other adults in the community. Chris eventually learned that his birth mother—one of Newton’s patients who had felt (or had been deemed) incapable of raising him—had agreed to hand him over to Jane. “This made me feel like I was an experimental subject raised by the core theorist of the group,” he said, wondering whether people never spoke about his origins because it might throw off the experiment as they watched to see how he would turn out. But the silence left him, as he put it, “a man without a story.”
Until he was about five, Chris went every day to play in a big house on West Ninety-First Street, where Newton, who had by then divorced Jane Pearce, lived with his new family and about twenty other people in a building that also served as the new headquarters of the Sullivan Institute. Unlike the rest of the members, the leaders were allowed to live with their spouses and children, albeit communally and polyamorously. The building was a former school building that had been converted into a multifamily residence, with offices on the ground floor for the therapists. Chris recalls the house as a kind of magical children’s playground. Three or four families lived there, including at least a dozen children, with babysitters, dogs, cats, hamsters, and sometimes even a chicken. The families occupied separate floors, but there were no locks or doors separating them, and the children and pets raced upstairs and down in search of playmates and new games to play. There were clusters of kids around the same age, and Chris was part of a little band of four or five boys who were as close to one another as brothers. To him it seemed like a utopia for children. He would realize much later that it was in fact designed that way. Along with Newton, his adoptive mother had stressed the importance of “chumship”—children developing close bonds with other children. Their book stressed that children needed to be free from the overweening presence of their parents and that they needed other adults in their lives who could be their “alternate validators.” Sullivanian children spent more time with and were usually closer to their babysitters than to their parents. At the same time, Jane Pearce was a caring parental presence in Chris’s life; they generally saw each other every evening at dinnertime.
Then something happened. One day Chris was told that he would no longer be going to the house on Ninety-First Street. Overnight, he would no longer see the friends he had come to regard as siblings. He didn’t know what had forced such a radical change in his life, and no explanation was offered. It was for him a paradise lost, his banishment as mysterious as his own origin. “It was absolutely traumatic,” he said. “I lost all of my best friends, my whole family.”
As best as he can recollect, at Christmastime in 1979, a group of Sullivanian patients arrived at Jane Pearce’s town house and rang the bell loudly, carrying gifts for him. But Jane Pearce didn’t open the door—she was afraid, Chris believes, that they were there to take him away. When they wouldn’t leave and kept ringing the bell, she called the police. One of his memories of Christmas 1979 was of two police officers bringing an armful of gifts into the house.
Evidently something had gone wrong with the experiment, but no one explained to Chris what had happened. It would be many years before he learned the actual story of his origins and saw that it was intimately connected with many other stories in a much larger psychological experiment that stretched back many years.
* * *
Forty years later, in 2019, Michael Cohen—a sixty-nine-year-old psychologist in Brooklyn—got a phone call from a woman he hadn’t heard from in decades. They had both been therapists at the Sullivan Institute, though Cohen had left the group in 1985, a departure that was seen by those who stayed behind as a major betrayal, and so the two had lost touch. Now the woman needed his help: her two children, both adults in their thirties, were desperate to find out who their biological father was, and Cohen was a possible candidate.
The Sullivan Institute had encouraged women who wanted to have children to involve several men in the process of getting pregnant—part of the strategy to prevent people from forming stable, monogamous couples and nuclear families, as no one would know who the father was. Many Sullivanian children were conceived and raised collectively and taught that their genetic inheritance was of no importance. But now that they were adults—and there were inexpensive DNA tests available—many of them wanted to solve the mystery of their paternity as a way of coming to terms with a complicated past.
All this was deeply confusing and difficult for Mike Cohen and his family. He had spent much of the previous thirty-four years putting that chapter of his life behind him. At the same time, like almost all former Sullivanians, it remained a central part of his life. His wife, Amy Siskind, was also a former group member—twice over—having grown up as the child of a Sullivanian patient in the 1960s, as well as being a child patient herself and then becoming a patient again as an adult in the 1970s and ’80s. Mike and Amy had left the group because they wanted to marry and have a family together—something their therapists tried to prevent. Amy had then written a Ph.D. dissertation about the group, which was published as a book.
Despite all they knew and had experienced of life in the group, it had frankly never occurred to either of them that some of the kids running around the Sullivanian apartments all those decades earlier might be Cohen’s. It was distressing to their grown daughter, who was not keen to learn whether she had older siblings somewhere. But Cohen felt that as a matter of decency, he should consent to provide a DNA sample.
What was happening with Cohen was happening throughout the Sullivanian community. Dozens of kids who were born in the group banded together to share their genetic data in order to solve the puzzle of their parentage. They were forcing their parents into frank conversations about the past that they had been avoiding for many years. Many former members had not even told their children that they’d been part of a polyamorous group. Some children who grew up without a father now found one, as well as an extended family. Others made the disconcerting discovery that the person they considered their father was not in fact their biological parent and that some relative stranger was. When all the tests were in, it was as if the threads of a complex tapestry were tied together completing the story begun by Pearce and Newton long ago. The flurry of DNA revelations and the search for missing relations carried out by the children of the Sullivan Institute provided a strange and ironic ending to the story of a group that had set out to dismantle the nuclear family.
For the Sullivanian children, the genetic search was part of a deeper attempt to make sense of their lives and to figure out what their parents were doing and thinking back in the 1970s. “I think for me it’s been about, first of all, try and understand what the hell that was. You know, what is that thing I was raised in?” says Pam Newton, one of the ten children of the movement’s cofounder, Saul Newton.
It was also a moment of reckoning for one of the most radical social experiments of our times: a thirty-five-year attempt to reengineer family, sexual, and social life in what may have been the largest urban commune in the United States.
* * *
I learned about the Sullivan Institute by chance in the 2010s and was stunned to realize that, although I had been living on the Upper West Side for decades, I was entirely unaware of what was, in effect, an alternate society in our midst, hidden in plain sight.
The group, which operated from the mid-1950s until it dissolved in 1991, was extremely secretive during its life and remained so for many years. But as its former members have reached their sixties and seventies, they have begun to speak more openly about their experiences. As a result, it is now possible to put together a narrative history of this little-known and singular chapter of the American counterculture.
They created a parallel world, living by precise rules and precepts almost entirely at odds with those of mainstream society. Under the direction of their therapists, the Sullivanians were trying to create a utopian world based on the principles of free love, collective living, self-actualization, and a commitment to socialism. In one sense, the group partook of the counterculture of the 1960s, the decade of sexual liberation and communal living. Yet most of the era’s communes—an estimated three thousand in the 1960s and ’70s—lived in isolation in such places as rural Oregon and Vermont. This group was composed almost entirely of high-performing urban professionals—doctors, lawyers, computer programmers, successful artists and writers, professors—who went to normal jobs by day but returned in the evening to a very different and highly secretive world built around fellowship, polyamorous sex, radical politics, and political theater.
A key event in the group’s demise occurred four blocks from where I was living in 1986. A member of the group had kidnapped her own child in front of the building on West 100th Street where she lived at the time. She had been in Sullivanian therapy for fifteen years, and when she had finally had a child, the senior therapists of the group had prevented her from seeing her infant daughter for several months. After consulting a lawyer, she hired two bodyguards, took the child, and went into hiding. This was the first of several legal battles that helped lead to the group’s dissolution in 1991. How could all this have happened in my own neighborhood without my having any idea?
The Sullivan Institute came into being during the 1950s, when the idea of traditional marriage and family was at the height of its power and authority in American life—the decade of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952–66) and Father Knows Best (1954–60). Being settled in a well-adjusted, monogamous marriage was the goal of most psychoanalysis, the gold standard of mental health. At the same time, under the surface, various forms of dissatisfaction and rebellion were rumbling, as evidenced in such works as the James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). The Kinsey Reports (1948 and 1953) revealed that Americans’ sex lives were far messier and more complicated than the conventional model everyone paid lip service to. People yearned for more, but society condemned them for it. Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (published in 1963, the same year as Jane Pearce and Saul Newton’s Conditions of Human Growth) revealed the intense dissatisfaction of women straitjacketed by the life of wife and mother.
Why should therapy simply try to help patients “adjust” to what was essentially a bad deal? What if therapy could expand people’s lives, open their opportunities for growth, and free them from the crushing weight of conformity and societal expectations? The family seemed, to some, like the primary instrument with which society forced a deadening conformity on its members.
Jane Pearce and Saul Newton believed that the family had trained children to suppress their own deepest desires, their spontaneity, and their need for warmth and empathy. Children were trapped under the weight of expectations of parents who pushed them to conform and felt threatened by any attempt on the part of the child to break free and act on their instincts and desires. Pearce and Newton were not the only maverick therapists to feel this way. R. D. Laing, David Cooper, and Paul Goodman came to similar conclusions in the same period. “The child, in fact, is taught primarily not how to survive in society, but how to submit to it,” Cooper wrote in his book The Death of the Family (1971).
“From the moment of birth,” Laing wrote in The Politics of Experience (1967), “the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.”
What if therapy taught people to trust and follow their own deepest desires and instincts rather than suppress them in order to adapt to the expectations of parents and society? Pearce and Newton—and like-minded radicals—believed that the “underground” of instinctual life remained alive but buried inside people, and that the therapist could be the ally of the “guerrilla fighter” that lived within each of us, yearning for real growth and real experience. Political radicals—who viewed with sympathy guerrilla movements and revolutions in such places as Cuba and China—believed that individual liberation was essential to social justice. “Successful analysis involves becoming accustomed to revolution,” they wrote.
The Sullivan Institute was founded in 1957, the year that the birth control pill was submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for approval. And, in a sense, the life of the group spanned and was a cultural expression of the window of time between the introduction of the pill and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, a brief slice of history during which it seemed possible to rethink sex, love, marriage, intimacy, and family—institutions that had been, until then, limited by biology and procreation, along with the possessive ethos of monogamy designed to guarantee a father’s paternity. This seemed an opportunity to rearrange human relations, to go beyond the limiting nuclear family, and to create a larger community with a different set of values built around the ideals of fellowship, political commitment, and sex without guilt, jealousy, or possessiveness.
Sexual revolution was central to the idea of achieving a fuller, more authentic, and spontaneous emotional life. “Making love is good in itself, and the more it happens in any way possible or conceivable between as many people as possible, the better,” Cooper wrote in The Death of the Family. But it wasn’t just about sex. Cooper also advocated for the development of communal arrangements that broke down the walls of the family prison house. “Children should have totally free access to adults beyond their biological parental couple,” he wrote.
While therapists like Cooper and Laing described the family as a kind of trap for shackling our desires and creative potential, Jane Pearce and Saul Newton actually tried to carry out their radical program of getting rid of the family on a large scale. They tried it—to an extent—in their own lives and on their own families as well as in those of their patients, creating a community of several hundred people whom they encouraged or pushed to rigorously carry out their program. Members of the group were strictly forbidden (even if legally married) from having exclusive sexual relationships. Even if not having sex, therapists encouraged them to sleep with other group members—whether of the same or the other sex—in order to create bonding and fellowship. They were forbidden from spending too much time with their own children—that is, if their therapists allowed them to have children.
It is not coincidental that the Sullivanian experiment began in an era when psychoanalysis was at the height of its prestige. Psychologists felt emboldened to try out their theories in ways that would never pass muster today with any academic ethics board. The Robbers Cave experiment (1954) pitted groups of boys into opposing camps that resulted in a kind of Lord of the Flies degree of group hostility. Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiments (1963) encouraged participants to inflict pain on others—to see how far they would go in obeying authority. In the Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), a psychology professor created a simulated prison in which students were asked to be either prisoners or guards, leading to disturbing levels of cruel and sadistic behavior. These experiments lasted a short time, but their meaning and value—as well as the potential harm they caused—are still widely debated.
The Sullivan Institute was an enormous natural experiment to test a specific idea of human nature: that nature was nothing and nurture was everything. It was carried out on several hundred—perhaps even a few thousand—people over a thirty-five-year period. Yet, ironically, the group was finally done in by the thing it had set out to destroy: the family. Couples who were tired of being kept apart and parents who rebelled against being separated from their children eventually caused the group’s disintegration. “They thought biology was nothing,” said one child who grew up in the Sullivanian community, was allowed to see her mother only one day a week, and was kept in the dark about her biological father. “Well, it’s not everything, but it’s not nothing.”
During its different phases the Sullivan Institute encapsulated many of the major themes—and pitfalls—of twentieth-century counterculture.
In its first ten or fifteen years, this novel form of treatment, which encouraged patients to experiment sexually, trust their impulses, and break free of family dependency relationships, appealed to many artists and creative individuals. The famous art critic Clement Greenberg was an early patient, as was the artist Jackson Pollock, both of whom entered Sullivanian therapy two years before the formal creation of the institute. A Who’s Who of abstract expressionists followed, as did a host of other exceptionally creative people, including the dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs (who became famous for her choreography of Einstein on the Beach, which premiered in 1976), the novelists Richard Elman and Richard Price, and two members of the music group Sha Na Na, and many others. There were lots of patients who were not famous artists: men trapped in dull jobs or suffering from loneliness; frustrated wives, whose therapists encouraged them to leave their husbands, have affairs, and hand over the care of their children to others so that they could explore their own creative potential.
In the 1960s, Pearce and Newton began to give therapeutic application to Sullivan’s belief in the importance of same-sex friendships, encouraging their patients to live together in single-sex apartments. This approach fit a zeitgeist in which communal living and sexual freedom thrived. Gradually, a Sullivanian community emerged that became increasingly codified: patients had datebooks that they filled up with appointments, not just for sexual encounters but also for study dates, friendship dates, men’s and women’s groups, painting classes, writing groups, dates to play music together. Along with having multiple sexual partners, patients were encouraged to have “sleepover” dates, often with same-sex friends, to get closer to one another. Every weekend there were Sullivanian parties, which invariably ended with everyone pairing off and going to bed with someone else. To do otherwise was seen as a refusal to grow. In the summertime they all rented shares in houses out in Amagansett on Long Island, near where the lead therapists owned houses.
When Richard Price, as a young graduate student working on his first novel, stumbled onto this community, welcomed by women happy to sleep with him and men eager to become his friends, he felt as if he had been admitted to a kind of elite secret society that had devised a superior way of life. “It was like instant community, instant sex. It felt like somebody had opened the gates of heaven,” he said.
But with time, life in the group became increasingly regimented and controlled. What began as a loose community of like-minded souls morphed into a more formal group with the creation of a political theater company—the Fourth Wall Repertory Company, which put on plays and performed music in a large theater they acquired in the East Village. There were monthly dues and membership lists, and members—all Sullivanian patients—were expected to work a certain number of hours each week. Jane Pearce, the chief theorist and cofounder of the Sullivan Institute, was forced out, her place taken by two younger and more attractive women in Saul Newton’s life who became his fifth and sixth wives as well as lead supervising therapists for the institute. As the years passed, Newton created a personality cult around himself and adopted an increasingly autocratic leadership style.
Copyright © 2023 by Alexander Stille