THE SULLIVANIANS

The life and times of a cult that was strange even as cults go.

Prolific journalist Stille examines the Sullivanians, offshoot followers of psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949), “high-performing urban professionals—doctors, lawyers, computer programmers, successful artists and writers, professors—who went to normal jobs by day but returned in the evening to a very different and highly secretive world.” That world, encompassing some major cultural figures, embraced polygamy and polyamory and the group raising of children and abnegation of the nuclear family. Moreover, belonging to it required fealty to a psychologist named Saul Newton and a succession of his wives, one a “rather conventional young woman from a middle-class Jewish family” who tasted power and, by the account of some members, took a tyrannical turn. In the end, it was a sort of Ponzi scheme: “Therapists” unqualified to practice outside the cult took money from lesser “therapists,” and most of it wound up in the hands of the leaders. So it went from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, when some members, awakened by one injury or another, began to drift away. Stille’s onrushing, riveting narrative makes The Blithedale Romance seem like a children’s book by comparison. As Newton and company became worse and worse, he demanding sexual favors from every woman in the Sullivanian orbit, a quiet resistance grew. Surprisingly, children raised collectively and discouraged to seek the identity of their biological parents embarked on that search during adulthood, while a few of the erstwhile leaders came to accept that maybe their program was highly flawed. As with so many cults, the Orwellian principle that some animals are more equal than others shines through always. “Although it was in principle an egalitarian communist group,” Stille writes, “the Sullivanians were remarkably hierarchical, and everyone was aware where they stood at any given moment in the pecking order.”

A brilliantly written, sobering investigation of a secret society within plain sight.