
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Alexander Stille talks about his fascinating new book, The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune. Led by a charismatic psychoanalyst, the Sullivanians flourished in Manhattan's tony neighborhood in the 1970s and 80s, attracting many brilliant, creative people as patients, including Jackson Pollack and Judy Collins. But what started as a utopian experiment in psychoanalysis devolved into a paranoid sex cult in which therapists controlled their patients' lives, instructing them who to sleep with and where they could work. The real tragedy is the story of the children, who were shipped off to boarding schools so that their parents could be free to sleep around and jettison the constraints of the nuclear family. Stille is an accomplished journalists and a professor at Columbia Journalism School.
4.9
163163 ratings
Alexander Stille talks about his fascinating new book, The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune. Led by a charismatic psychoanalyst, the Sullivanians flourished in Manhattan's tony neighborhood in the 1970s and 80s, attracting many brilliant, creative people as patients, including Jackson Pollack and Judy Collins. But what started as a utopian experiment in psychoanalysis devolved into a paranoid sex cult in which therapists controlled their patients' lives, instructing them who to sleep with and where they could work. The real tragedy is the story of the children, who were shipped off to boarding schools so that their parents could be free to sleep around and jettison the constraints of the nuclear family. Stille is an accomplished journalists and a professor at Columbia Journalism School.
44,046 Listeners
2,841 Listeners
90,536 Listeners
37,950 Listeners
27,235 Listeners
11,005 Listeners
619 Listeners
996 Listeners
26,356 Listeners
215 Listeners
1,097 Listeners
15,012 Listeners
14,386 Listeners
1,426 Listeners
15,489 Listeners