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The Sullivanians is an immensely engaging and at times horrifying record of a psychoanalytic cult based in New York City. It operated from its founding in 1957 until its dissolution in 1991. The group's formal name was The Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, and its founders were Dr. Jane Pearce, a psychiatrist, and her husband, Saul Newton. Over the arc of its existence, the Sullivanians included hundreds of people interested in psychoanalysis as well as the hedonistic lifestyle the group embraced. It attracted artists, student and cultural revolutionaries, and counted among its numbers the singer Judy Collins and the painter Jackson Pollock.
Both Pearce and Newton were originally affiliated with the William Alanson White Institute in New York; Pearce was a psychiatrist, who trained and taught at the White Institute, and Newton worked as bursar. Although the particular abuses of the Sullivanians stand out as extraordinary, the occurrence of a split within an established psychoanalytic institute does not. Factionalism and splitting appear to be woven into the DNA of psychoanalytic training institutes, including those within analytical psychology. The William Alanson White Institute itself had come into existence after a succession of splits at other East Coast training institutes. Its current iteration was founded in 1943 by Harry Stack Sullivan (see his book from 1953, cited in references). Dr. Clara Thompson served as its first director, and she spoke about a tendency toward divisiveness and authoritarianism in a number of papers and talks delivered at the Institute. Under her leadership, as well as with the influences of Sullivan, Erich Fromm and William White, the Institute transformed American psychoanalysis in determinedly post-Freudian ways. Their teaching and training pioneered Interpersonal Psychoanalysis with an emphasis on offering patients what Thompson deemed to be at the heart of the work: “to feel accepted and fundamentally respected” (T