Sullivan Institute

The Sullivan Institute, and the communal society sometimes called the Sullivanians that grew out of it, was founded in New York in the 1950s by Saul Newton and Jane Pearce, drawing its name and some of its language from the interpersonal psychoanalysis of Harry Stack Sullivan, though it departed sharply from mainstream psychoanalytic practice. Its distinctive teaching was a radical rejection of the traditional nuclear family, which it regarded as the root source of psychological damage; members were encouraged to loosen or sever ties with parents and to avoid exclusive couple relationships in favor of a more communal, non-monogamous life, with child-rearing arranged collectively.

Over time the therapy practice and its clientele evolved into a tightly knit residential community on Manhattan's Upper West Side, active into the 1980s and involved in cultural and theatrical pursuits. It has since been examined chiefly through the accounts of former members and later historical study, some of which describe the therapists' considerable influence over members' major life decisions, including relationships and the raising of children, and disputes over custody as the community broke up. The group is discussed in the literature on "therapy cults" as an example of how a psychotherapeutic practice organized around strong authority can develop into an all-encompassing community; assessments rest largely on retrospective testimony.

The Sullivan Institute's public face in its later years was a theatre. The Fourth Wall Repertory Company, run by Joan Harvey, staged political musicals in the East Village while functioning as the community's cultural arm, and the fourth floor buildings on the Upper West Side where members lived in single sex apartments housed what was by then less a therapy practice than a total community of several hundred professionals. Its doctrines about the family produced its legal history. Teaching that the nuclear family was the root of pathology, the leadership directed members to limit contact with parents, managed sexual pairings, and treated children as the community's rather than the couple's, boarding many out or raising them by rota. When members left, custody fights followed, and the cases of the 1980s, in which departing parents fought the community and sometimes their own former spouses for their children, brought the group its first sustained press scrutiny, including coverage of members' flight from the city with children during the disputes.

The community declined after founder Saul Newton's death in 1991 and dissolved within a year or two. Its history has since been written twice over: by former members, whose accounts and a documentary by a child of the group reckon with what growing up there cost, and by Alexander Stille, whose 2023 book The Sullivanians reconstructed the whole arc from radical psychoanalysis to closed community, restoring to view a group that had hidden in plain sight in Manhattan for forty years.