The Sullivanians’ bête noire was the nuclear family, which they identified as the wellspring of all human pathology. To shake off bourgeois norms, Sullivanian patients lived with same-sex roommates and cultivated close platonic friendships, replete with tween-style sleepovers. They had lots of (hetero)sexual partners—in fact, turning down most any sexual proposition from a group member was frowned upon. But they were not allowed to form steady romantic relationships. To a Sullivanian, Stille explains, sexual jealousy was “a by-product of a capitalist mentality that saw marriage and monogamy as a form of ownership.” (Jackson Pollock, an early Sullivanian patient, was a fan of the method in part because he could cheat on his wife.) Higher-ups prodded Sullivanians to renounce their parents and other blood relatives; one member ceased contact with her twelve-year-old sister because the girl stopped going to therapy. Women had to seek permission to get pregnant. While trying to conceive, they would have sex with multiple men, in order to create ambiguity about their child’s biological father. Newton, for his part, did not lead by example—Pearce was his fourth wife, and there was no uncertainty about the paternity of Newton’s ten children. Wives No. 5 and 6, Joan Harvey and Helen Moses, were also therapists, whom Newton installed as top lieutenants in the Sullivanian enterprise.
The exact appeal of a cult can be impenetrable to outsiders, and even to its ex-members. But, in the sixties and seventies, the Sullivanian Institute had a winning sales pitch for young New Yorkers: parties, sex, low rent, and affordable therapy. (Therapists at the institute were also willing to write letters to the draft board on behalf of patients who were “psychologically unfit” to serve in the war in Vietnam—a powerful recruitment tool for the group.) “Everyone was friends with everyone else—dozens of young people in a handful of nearby buildings—in and out of one another’s apartments, playing music, having parties,” Stille writes. The novelist Richard Price, who was a creative-writing student at Columbia when he became involved in the group, in 1972, told Stille, “It felt to me like this is just: add water and it’s instant friends. And you know, girls are going in and out. . . . It’s instant sex life.” Suddenly, Price went on, “it’s like somebody opened the gates of heaven.”