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Vol. 2. NIH Pub. No.94-3723. Rockville, MD: National Institute on Alcohol Abuse
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Project Match Research Group. (1997). Matching alcoholism treatments to client
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Steve K. D. Eichel, Ph.D., ABPP
Madness and Evil—A Review of The Sullivanian Institute/Fourth Wall
Community: The Relationship of Radical Individualism and
Authoritarianism
Amy B. Siskind, Praeger: Westport, Connecticut, 2003. 170 pages. $62.95
I recently played, for a psychoanalytic study group of which I am a member, a comedy
sketch, recorded ages ago, in which Elaine May and Mike Nichols portray a psychoanalyst
and her patient. Having had a good laugh each of the numerous times I have listened to
this sketch over the years, I gleefully, and as I now know naively, imagined my typically
serious and scholarly group uncharacteristically doubled over, wiping tears of laughter from
their eyes, enjoying a good joke on us all. In the sketch, the patient (Nichols) informs May,
his analyst, that in the following week he will have to miss the last of his five sessions per
week, since it is Christmas Eve and he plans to be with his family that day. Instantly
shattered by the news of her patient‘s plan to desert her, May attempts to maintain her
analytic stance and mask her spiraling self-fragmentation by demanding that her patient
explore, be curious about, reflect on and associate to his need to miss his session. In the
face of his insistence that he just wants to be with his family on Christmas Eve, the analyst
begins to weep quietly, then to sob in despair, then to scream with rage. Unable to help her
recompensate, the patient quietly retreats, wishing her a Merry Christmas, as the analyst
continues to unravel. When I turned off the recording, I faced a silent group, with some
members finally confessing to a sense of excruciating anxiety while listening. There was
little further discussion. We moved on quickly to the material we had planned to discuss. In
showbiz parlance, I had bombed. Though unable to articulate at the time why the sketch
repeatedly cracks me up, I can now say that for me, it helps to laugh about the ever
present, always not fully analyzed narcissism of the psychoanalyst—that is, to laugh at it,
but not to laugh it off.
Narcissism is a problem for our patients, but it is just as much a problem for the profession
of psychoanalysis and for every psychoanalyst. It is a problem that has shadowed our
profession from the beginning, and it is a problem that our profession still struggles to
address adequately. Freud formulated his conceptualization of narcissism in 1914, and
proceeded to enact some of its more problematic aspects: he deemed himself the only
analyst not in need of an analysis by another analyst he set up a book of rules for the
analytic process, which he exempted himself from following and he marginalized innovative
followers and favored those whom he could more easily control. Authoritarian control and
suppression of dissent may have seemed, at the time, like necessary means to the crucial
end of establishing psychoanalysis as a profession, but in the long run these methods have
not proven effective. To the contrary, Balint‘s (1968) portrayal of the banishment of
Ferenczi from the analytic community as a trauma to the profession remains relevant still,
decades after he made it. Although it is increasingly more likely in our professional
publications and conferences to see rival psychoanalytic schools seeking common ground,
years of rampant factionalism and internecine power struggles, along with authoritarian,
incestuous training systems (see Levine and Reed, 2004), have substantially contributed, I
believe, to the embarrassing fact that the majority of the public no longer has a clue as to
what we mean when we say ―psychoanalysis.‖

Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2006, Page 100
The worst potential of narcissism, for which we reserve the term ―malignant,‖ was
fortunately not realized by Freud, whose work, in spite of his imperial tendencies and many
serious mistakes, has nevertheless been profoundly generative. But because the
psychotherapist is a potent transference figure—not quite a parent, not quite an Oracle, not
quite God Almighty, but, for many patients, something like all three—it is within our power,
if our power goes unchecked, to gain almost total control over our patients, or a group of
patients, and, in the name of psychotherapy and with the power invested in us, to abuse,
exploit, and enslave them in every conceivable way. That is precisely what happened when,
in 1957, Saul Newton and Jane Pearce began training therapists in what they called the
Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, later described in their book, written
primarily by Pearce, The Conditions of Human Growth (1963). Aside from a New York
magazine article (Black, 1975) and a Village Voice article (Conason &McGarrahan, 1986),
little has been written of the Sullivanians, until recently.
Amy B. Siskind, raised within the Sullivanian community and now a sociologist, has adapted
her Ph.D. dissertation into the first published book about the Sullivan Institute. Siskind does
not provide a tell-all personal account of her own experience as the child of a Sullivanian
patient, nor does she provide a psychological analysis of the dynamics of the group, its
leaders and followers. What she does present is a thorough sociological-historical account of
the group, its leaders, and its practices, as well as excerpts of accounts of the experiences
of former members. The publication of Siskind‘s book presents the psychoanalytic
community with an opportunity (although the opportunity has been there for quite some
time) to confront and try to make sense of some of the most egregious professional
violations and abuses ever to have occurred in the name of psychoanalysis. This review of
Siskind‘s book is a preliminary effort in that direction.
As Siskind tells the story, Jane Pearce, a psychiatrist who studied with Harry Stack Sullivan
in the late ‗40s, met Saul Newton in the early ‗50s at the William Alanson White Institute,
where he worked in the bursar‘s office. Newton had no degree and no formal training. He
was a charismatic confabulator, who convinced people who knew him that he had fought
with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Revolution. In fact, he had not been a
soldier at all, but a payroll clerk. Newton and Pearce married, and together they sought to
extend and elaborate Sullivan‘s ideas. They were particularly disappointed that Sullivan‘s
critique of society and family norms hadn‘t gone far enough. Dissatisfied with the White
Institute and seeking full control of an institute of their own, they permanently severed their
ties to White. Like many others swept up in the counterculture revolution of the ‗60s,
Newton and Pearce sought to create a community, like a Puritan city on a hill, whose
members would disdain decadent bourgeois conformity and convention, and reach superior
psychological status (and, by implication, superior moral status) through radical processes
of regression, corrective experience, and personality restructuring. The hidden problem with
many of these kinds of personal growth and self-realization projects is that they can often
degenerate into an attempt, for leaders and followers, to gain power so as to compensate
for a sense of impotence. Things go very wrong in these groups when narcissism runs
amok, and when omnipotence, as opposed to power, becomes the unconscious goal. In
such cases, these groups develop delusions of superiority accompanied by self-righteous
justifications for scapegoating, dominating, and controlling others.
Before cataloging some of the practices of the Sullivanian community, I want to emphasize,
for those who may not know, that these things did not happen, for example, in a
fundamentalist, apocalyptic, UFO, or other cultic group in the deep south or the remote west
of the United States, far from the reach of progressive contemporary cultural and
intellectual influence, and from the culture of psychoanalysis. This story took place on the
Upper West Side of New York City, involving a population of middle class, liberal, college-
educated artists, professionals, academics, and intellectuals—many of whom were notable