The Shocking Story of a Commune in the Most Unlikely of Places

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There’s a joke about the Upper West Side—the neighborhood that was once home to the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the novelists Isaac Bashevis Singer and Philip Roth, and the people who populate Alexander Stille’s rip-roaring new book The Sullivanians: Drop something out the window and it won’t hit the sidewalk, it’ll hit a shrink.

Starting in the 1950s the area was overrun with them: Freudians mingling with devotees of the more radical R.D. Laing; Bruno Bettelheimites fraternizing with Jung enthusiasts. Then there were the Sullivanians, disciples of Saul B. Newton and his coterie of therapists who believed that nuclear families were toxic, monogamous relationships were pointless, and children did best when their parents took as little interest as possible in their lives.

No wonder creative types, including Clement Greenberg, Jackson Pollock, and Judy Collins, flocked to the movement. In an era of experimentation, Newton provided the ultimate permission slip. Go ahead: Live a little.

What started as a school of therapeutic thinking grew into a secretive urban commune where therapists were all-powerful, controlling who patients slept with, how often parents saw their children, and which outside social contacts members maintained.

In Stille’s book, patients put their hearts and minds in Newton’s hands. It wasn’t until he died in 1991—and a pair of lawsuits exposed the Sullivanians’ unconventional policies—that the institute disbanded.

Never heard of them? Stille hadn’t either. He and I are both stalwart Upper West Siders, hip to each crack in the sidewalk and sale at the Dakota. But neither of us knew about the Sullivanians, who at one point numbered in the hundreds. Friends tipped him off to their existence, which moved him to track down former members (and read their diaries).

What he found was stranger-than-fiction horror set inside Manhattan apartments. “You think of communes as being in Vermont or Oregon,” Stille says. “What this group did was attract high-performing professionals, who lived a kind of double life.” In the morning, normal white collar professionals. At night, denizens of a “private, secret world.” Somehow the group kept it up for three decades.

When it all crumbled, it shocked not just observers but the members themselves. “These were people swimming against the tide,” Stille says of his characters, convention-shattering boomers with a yen for the counterculture. “These were people searching for a more authentic life.”

That’s part of the heartbreak of The Sullivanians, which is the kind of compulsive read meant to be devoured on a fire escape in the sultriest August heat. In the book one former member tells Stille, “We asked all the right questions and got all the wrong answers. But the questions were legitimate, and we’re still asking them.”

This story appears in the Summer 2023 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW

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