The founders of the Sullivanian Institute may have come closer than any of their far more notorious peers to establishing a truly metropolitan cult—its members visible but its practices obscure.
The Sullivanians housed many of their patient-members in buildings on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Barbara Antmann, whose sister was a Sullivanian, outside one of their buildings.Cults thrive in isolation, and this poses a challenge for the urban cult leader. Jim Jones, of the Peoples Temple, exerted an unsettling degree of influence on San Francisco politics of the late nineteen-seventies but was eventually forced to flee to his doomed jungle outpost in Guyana.
,” Sullivanian therapists became “the chief authorities in a patient’s life,” and their forceful guidance reflected Newton and Pearce’s antipathy toward conventions such as monogamy and filial piety. Firestone did not romanticize mothers or motherhood. The bond between a woman and her child, she wrote, was a breeding ground for anxiety and neediness, a mere “alliance of the oppressed.” The Sullivanians went further: they cast the mother herself as the oppressor.
We blame everything on mothers, and quite often for good reason. If something goes wrong with the child, the mother will loom large, either for her presence or for her absence. What the Sullivanian approach neglected to acknowledge, though, was that if you sever a child’s ties to their parents, an equally destructive parent manqué—whether it’s Saul Newton or the poorly trained staff at a squalid boarding school—might fill the void.
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