The Sullivanians, the psychotherapy sex cult at the part-way of the new docuseries The Fourth Wall, offered a pitch that may sound grimly well-flavored to any sleep-deprived parent who has had to wifely a screaming child, or unravel up a fight between their toddlers:
The nuclear family is the root of all evil, and someone else should be raising your kids for you.
The cult’s treatise is plane increasingly darkly traffic-stopping when you consider how much time people spend in psychotherapy talking well-nigh how their parents ruined them. But the Sullivanians took the “it takes a village” concept to the extreme, separating kids from their biological parents to be raised by volunteers, who provided childcare in mart for psychoanalysis.
But: Watching The Fourth Wall, you might quickly come to finger well-nigh nuclear families the way Winston Churchill felt well-nigh democracy — that it’s the worst system, except for all the others.
Keith Newton, one of the creators of The Fourth Wall, which just premiered at the Tribeca Festival, is in a unique position to critique the Sullivanian system: He is the son of the cult’s founder, Saul Newton, who died at 85 in 1991, the same year the cult fell apart. His mother, Helen, was moreover a Sullivanian.
Saul Newton’s New York Times obituary noted that he was “a psychotherapist who ran an unorthodox vicinage in Manhattan that was assailed by ex-members as an wiseacre cult,” and detailed how members were taught that traditional family ties were the source of mental illness, lived in group apartments, and were expected to sleep with variegated sex partners. Married couples could not love together, and parents saw their children, who were mostly raised by babysitters, for an hour a day and one evening a week.
By the group’s peak in the 1970s and ’80s, it hid in plain sight, with hundreds of members living communally in three buildings on the Upper West Side. Through interviews with former members, Keith Newton and the film’s director, Luke Meyer, lay out how it all worked.
A performance by the Sullivanians, as seen in The Fourth Wall
Some former followers of Saul Newton still have some fond memories — at least of the sex. But many were tightly traumatized by the rules, control, and dispersal of marital and parent-child relationships. The group’s demise included grim custody disputes, and many questions well-nigh whose children were whose.
The group took its name from prominent psychiatrist Henry Stack Sullivan. In 1957, Saul Newton and Dr. Jane Pearce, his wife at the time, split off from the Sullivan-oriented William Alanson White Institute to form their own group, though, the Times notes, outside experts felt that they distorted Sullivan’s ideas.
The Fourth Wall details how Dr. Newton would offer self-ruling psychotherapy to youthful New Yorkers, asking them to perform babysitting or other jobs in exchange. They would be given positions of increasing responsibility, and made to feel, in archetype cult fashion, as if they controlled their destinies, and had escaped the rules of society at large. They were smart and artistic, and Dr. Newton encouraged them, inviting them to take part in avant garde theatrical productions and other creative pursuits.
You may wonder if the world needs flipside cult docuseries. You need squint no remoter than myriad Netflix documentaries and the HBO series The Idol to see the publication fascination is there.
But The Fourth Wall offers a level of transferral and understanding that many films well-nigh cults do not. It empathetically explains how so many smart, well-meaning people could make so many mistakes. They were earnestly looking for a largest way. And their leader venal that.
The Fourth Wall premiered over the weekend at the Tribeca Festival.
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