Kaethe Cherney
Saul Newton founded the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis in the late 1950s with his first wife, Dr. Jane Pearce. An iconoclast and self-taught therapist, Newton viewed traditional family ties as the root cause of mental illness and advocated a non-monogamous lifestyle. His radical mores resonated with the era and in time their ranks grew to several hundred members, who lived in segregated apartments on the Upper West Side.
By the 1970s the Sullivanians utopian vision was becoming increasingly dystopian. Self-trained therapists advised their patients to sever contact with families and friends. Monogamy was frowned on and therapists and patients alike were encouraged to schedule sexual ‘dates’. Children born to members were sent to boarding school or cared for by babysitters, with parents only granted limited access. Authoritarian, paranoid and isolated behaviour set in.
When the Sullivanians formed the Fourth Wall Theatre Company, three members were arrested when they forcefully tried to evict the previous leaseholders from their new premise in the East Village. They physically attacked a neighbour who spilled paint on the exterior walls of the Institute. The Sullivanians fled to Florida thinking that Manhattan was about to be obliterated in the wake of a partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island. In 1986, the Village Voice published an article entitled "Escape from Utopia", which detailed how an ex-member resorted to kidnapping her own child to get it back. As a consequence, "PACT" (Parents Against Cult Therapy) was formed with the purpose of exposing the dishonest financial and professional practices within the Institute. Lawsuits and unwanted publicity plagued the Sullivanians, who disbanded when Saul Newton died in 1991.
