The Sullivan Institute/Fourth Wall Community: The Relationship of Radical Individualism and Authoritarianism

Amy B. Siskind's The Sullivan Institute, Fourth Wall Community, The Relationship of Radical Individualism and Authoritarianism, published by Praeger in 2003, is the only comprehensive scholarly study of the Sullivanian community, a psychotherapy based communal group active in New York from 1957 to 1992 whose leadership exercised extensive control over members' personal and family lives under a stated ideology of radical individualism. Siskind, herself a former member, combines sociological analysis with insider access to documents and testimony from other former members. Its strength is exactly that combination, insider access most outside researchers could never obtain paired with an analytical framework examining how the group's stated individualist ideology functioned to produce the opposite, tight authoritarian control. Its limit is that a former member's account, however analytically framed, carries the standing questions any insider history does about perspective and selective memory, so a claim resting on a specific contested episode benefits from checking against other former members' independent accounts.