Did A Secret Manhattan Cult Drive Jackson Pollock To His Death?

The Sullivan Institute brought a radical vision to midcentury psychotherapy, promoting alcohol and sexual freedom as conduits for creative expression. For a tormented genius like Jackson Pollock, those ideas proved very dangerous.

I had been living on the Upper West Side for decades when, in the 2010s, I realized I had been entirely unaware of what was, in effect, an alternate society in our midst, hidden in plain sight. Founded in 1957, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis was a utopian community of a few hundred people in which therapists and their patients lived alongside each other in large group apartments. Its creators, the married psychotherapists Saul Newton and Jane Pearce, were influenced by the neo-Freudian psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, who believed that psychological problems were inherently about interpersonal relationships… read more >