The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune by Alexander Stille; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $30
Itโs almost amazing that not once in his intensely readable new book does Alexander Stille quote Philip Larkinโs most (in)famous line of poetry: โThey fuck you up, your mum and dad.โ That sentiment was, essentially, the motivating principle of the communal Sullivan Institute, a rogue psychotherapy outfit on Manhattanโs Upper West Side thatโover the course of its more than 30-year existence, from the late 1950s to the early 1990sโgrew into a sex cult committed to abolishing within its midst the nuclear family, on the grounds that close romantic and familial bonds were psychologically harmful to adults and children alike.
But Stille has equally pungent material to work with. One Sullivanian is quoted saying of his own forebear, โItโs easy to be an anti-Semite when you grow up with a father like that.โ Anotherโs mother is referred to as โthat old womb with a built-in tomb.โ The latter quotation comes from painter Jackson Pollock, whoโs among a small parade of notables who wander like oddballs through this strange milieu. (Others include art critic Clement Greenberg, singer Judy Collins, and novelist Richard Price.)
Dishy as it is, however, Stilleโs book is hardly an exercise in name dropping. The true heroes and villains in this storyโmost individuals, children excepted, take turns being bothโare everyday people whose dramas are sometimes darkly amusing but more often heartbreaking. These are real members of nontheoretical families who found themselves at once the victims and willing enforcers of disastrous social theories that were explicitly, vilely antifamily. Through all phases of the story, from the kinky, free-love eccentricity of the early years to the insularity, paranoia, and criminality of the later years, Stille maintains an admirable, almost tenacious sympathy for his subjectsโa sympathy some of those subjects, in retrospect, arenโt sure they deserve. But as the cognitive dissonance grows, so too does the tension, making the book an improbable thriller, propelling us from chapter to chapter to see how these unfortunates will extricate themselves (if they can) from a Gordian knot of their own creation. Will anyone make it out emotionally intact, reasonably functional? Will they be reunited with their own blood, whom theyโve been conditioned to regard with indifference if not hostility?
One cavil: Stille places the origin of his story in a typically caricatured version of 1950s America, an unsophisticated place marked by little more than stifling convention (Father Knows Best, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet), but with a hint of rebellion on the horizon (Rebel Without a Cause, On the Roadโ). The implication being that the Sullivan Institute was part of that incipient rebellion, a harbinger of the revolutions to come in the ensuing decade. This is misleading on two fronts.
First, 1950s America was not some sheltered national virgin whose inaugural orgasm awaited in the mind-blowing, consciousness-raising โ60s. The conventionality we associate with the โ50s was partly a return to normal after the 1940s, a decade thatโowing to war-related domestic upheavalsโsaw myriad social and sexual pathologies rise, some drastically. (Jack Kerouacโs dionysian On the Road, it should be remembered, was a chronicle of journeys taken mostly in the late โ40s, though the book wasnโt published for another decade.) Given this recent anomie, the return to conventionality in the 1950s was akin to what Stille observed among former Sullivanians, who left behind the communeโs deliberate parental chaos and loveless promiscuity to find shelter in the old-fashioned romantic and family structures the commune had forbidden.
Second, the ideas that animated the Sullivan Institute werenโt born in reaction to 1950s American convention. They were a proactive (if kooky) extension of theories that had emerged partly from the Frankfurt School in the prewar years. One of the Sullivan Instituteโs founders claimed to have learned at the feet of, among others, the social psychologist Erich Fromm, who himself had participated with a Frankfurt School colleague, philosopher Max Horkheimer, on Studies on Authority and the Family (1936). That publication is a heady mix of Freudianism and Marxism that placed the familyโits dynamics, dysfunctions, sublimations, and pathologiesโfirmly within a web of larger social and historical forces that acted on it. Those forces chiefly related to capitalism, under which fathers were seen to enact a kind of small-scale ownership and exploitation of their own families. If the surrounding society could be made more just and egalitarian, it might, in Horkheimerโs words, โreplace the individualistic motive as the dominant bond in relationships,โ giving rise to โa new community of spouses and children,โ in which children โwill not be raised as future heirs and will therefore not be regarded, in the old way, as โoneโs own.โโโ
Thatโs a pretty fair approximation of what the Sullivanians fancied themselves pursuing. How did it go? โThere was a feeling of pressure,โ said one cult member, โthat was really unpleasant, of having to conform in a certain way to unconformity.โ Women endeavoring to get pregnant were required to sleep with multiple men while ovulating, to obscure paternity, whichโsaid one male Sullivanian remorsefullyโmade it โeasier to dissociate from the possible offspring.โ Maternal bonds were broken as well, as children were taken from their mothers and raised in other parts of the commune by groups of men or women, with biological mothers being granted ruthlessly limited interactions with their offspringโand those offspring ultimately being denied knowledge of their origins. Per Horkheimer, children were not, in the old way, oneโs own. Many of the children themselves came to regard their parents as โinsane,โ โbasically a bunch of zombies.โ In the long aftermath, one remarked, โIโve thought three different men were my father in the past three years. Iโm exhausted by having to relive the mistakes of my parents.โ Another felt that he had been treated like an โexperimental subjectโโhis childhood and his tender, developing psyche deformed by othersโ commitment to validating a theory.
The Sullivan Institute insisted that every familyโcategoricallyโwas a source of Larkinesque psychological damage. Then the institute became a scaled-up version of one and proved it.
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