One of the Sullivan Institute’s buildings in NYC. Thanks, http://www.thesociallifeofartisticproperty.com.
Today I’m going to write about the experiences of Dr. Amy B. Siskind inside the NYC-based Sullivanian cult, as she relates them in the current edition of the International Cultic Studies Journal Vol 5, 2014.
I’m writing about the Sullivanians, or “Fourth Wall” cult, because this group has an ‘elite’ pedigree, as far as American power-circles go, and because the cult’s history sheds light on the origins of the CIA’s ‘mind control’ MK ULTRA program.
Siskind was a child when her mother entered the Sullivanians, right on the heels of divorcing Siskind’s father. (You may be interested in reading about second-generation cult members.) In Siskind’s words, this is what the now-disbanded Sullivanians were all about:
Pearce and Newton [founders of the Sullivanian cult] believed that the nuclear family was the cornerstone of an unhealthy and selfish society. Specifically, they viewed the relationship of mothers to their children as the cause of almost all psychopathology, and also as the basis of all individual limitations…
Therefore, in order to enable children to become healthy adults, Pearce and Newton deemed it necessary to make radical changes in the structure of the family and in child-rearing practices. The Sullivan Institute/Fourth Wall therapeutic community was an outgrowth of this ideology. In the formative years of the community (1957 to 1970), the leadership undertook the creation of “hitherto unconceived social forms”2 by advising patients to formally break off contact with their families of origin, by advising childless patients not to have children, and by requiring members who were already parents either to send their children to boarding schools or hire full-time caregivers and housekeepers.
2 Pearce and Newton, Conditions of Human Growth, 1963 (Citadel Press), p. 7
Siskind reflects on the negative influences from her involvement with the Sullivanians:
The developement of my sexuality and my sense of myself as a sexual being was deeply affected by my experiences with Ralph Klein [a Sullivanian leader]. His voyeuristic comments and attitude impacted me in the sense that I believe I acted in ways that I wouldn’t have otherwise. My early experimentation with sexual activity may or may not have taken place without his input, but I don’t think that my objectification of myself would have been the same. I was taught to distance my sexual feelings from my other emotions. Thankfully, I wasn’t always able to achieve this separation; but at certain points in my life I did have sexual encounters that were fairly impersonal. In the Sullivan Institute community, for anyone to become deeply emotionally involved with one person was considered dangerous.
My sense of myself as a competent, intelligent person was both enhanced and assaulted at various points by my [cult-appointed] therapists and by the leadership of the community. I was supported in my academic aspirations, but at a certain point the demands of the group made it impossible for me to achieve my goals. Additionally, one of the most basic things about my sense of self-worth as a woman– my ability to raise a child– was questioned.
Simply having a great many social experiences in the context of the community helped my shyness and social anxiety. However, the deeper issues of my difficulties with friendship and committment were never addressed. While I was a member of the group, I was able to develop close relationships with women and a few men. I don’t remember being helped to deepen these relationships.
Because my relationships with my father and mother were stopped during the period I was in the group, I didn’t have the opportunity to develop adult relationships with them. I didn’t learn that I could separate from them, hold different opinions from them, and still love them… I reconnected with my father several months after I left the community, just before my brother died violently in Israel in what was called suicide.
What I’d like readers to take home is how the cult attacked Siskind’s family relationships, particularly the bond between Siskind and her mother, and between Siskind and the children she wished for (Siskind and her husband adopted a baby in later life, after leaving the cult). By attacking the family relationship, the Sullivanians were able to isolate Siskind from meaningful, non-cult influences.
What happened to Siskind struck me because of the new way I learned to understand ‘family’ while I lived in various developing countries. Anglo-American expectations of ‘family’ are different from those in most other parts of the world.
In most of the world two or three generations live together under one roof and, in turn, this multi-generational household is part of a tight-knit community of people with similar backgrounds. In these communities ‘like marries like’ and the ‘in-group’ help each other first.
On the other hand, for people of European descent in the Anglo-American world, ‘family’ tends to mean children and their immediate parents, with grandparents on either side living separately– often too far away to play much of a role in family life. Westerners are discouraged by the State, their church and Academia from distinguishing between ‘self’ and ‘other’ when practising altruism.
This Western difference has huge implications; implications which I might not be aware of if I hadn’t lived overseas. The most important of these is that Westerners have a smaller family network to draw on for protection or support. In order to get to Amy Siskind, all the Sullivanians had to do was convince her mother. Might the outcome have been different if, say, Amy’s grandparents were allowed/expected to have as much say about Siskind’s welfare as her mother?
Cults are not the only danger to vulnerable people. The extended family is important for resisting malignant social influences or government predation, too: consider the Uighur community in China. Uighurs, a Muslim minority, work together to protect themselves from persecution, real and imagined. (The flip side of this is that they often use the same networks for organized crime.) My point is that in most of the world extended family networks protect the individual from rapacious government officials– family provides protection from broken governments. The Western way of raising children makes us particularly vulnerable to government pressure.
Siskind’s abuse at the hands of the Sullivanians is terrifying, especially considering that she was just a child when the brain-washing started. But what if the isolating policies of the Sullivanians were not just a sad aberration, but an outgrowth of the interests and policies of a well-connected group of people with pull in Washington D.C.?
In this post, I argue that is the case: the Sullivanians’ ideas represented a perversion of popular elitist thinking, but not a very large perversion. I’ll do this by giving a brief history of the ideas and people who inspired the Sullivanians and their connections to Washington D.C. and the ‘intelligence community’. I’ll then offer one anecdote and a few suggestions as to how this cabal’s ideas are being implemented by the Federal government right now. My premise is that strong family bonds are essential to individual freedom; attacks on family bonds isolate the individual and a are part of effective mind-control strategies.
Effective mind-control strategies all use some element of isolation to keep their victims under thumb, this is true whether the manipulator is an exploitative institution, a religious cult, the ‘intelligence community’ or a narcissistic spouse. The power of isolation as a control tool has been known for a long time and breaking the target from family who are unsympathetic to the cult is a ‘must’ for cult-leaders. Here’s a quote from Shelly Rosen’s paper titled Cults: A Natural Disaster– Looking at Cult Involvement Through a Trauma Lens, which appeared in the International Cultic Studies Journal vol. 5, 2014:
The primacy of the two-parent, nuclear family is a recent development in human history and is in fact not the only paradigm for clan living in the modern world. The problem with one’s being born and raised in a cult is not that the members are not raised in nuclear families; one could argue that living with many people who support the parent-child bond is a better way to ensure secure attachment (Perry, 2009). Rather, the problem is that the leader and the group process perpetrate boundary violations on the group’s members; often separate spouses from each other, and parents from their children; and isolate their members from the greater world (Lalich & Tobias, 2006). This environment creates abandonment fear and stunts the process of sharing one’s particular proclivities with a variety of others, both of which greatly hinder development. A nuclear family with a narcissistic, isolating parent can be as problematic as a nonkin group with a narcissistic leader. The narcissism and the resulting lack of support, as well as the isolation from the greater human world, create the problem.
So how was isolation, as a manipulative tactic, reinvented in 1950s New York City?
Site of the Sullivanian’s propaganda organ, the ‘Fourth Wall Repertory Theater’, on 79 East 4th Street in NYC. Thanks,
http://www.thesociallifeofartisticproperty.com
The Sullivanians were founded by Saul Newton (born Saul Cohen) and his wife Jane Pearce. The couple met while working at the William Alanson White Institute, an organization which promotes psychoanalysis and the legacy of Sigmund Freud. The couple were also devotees of Harry Stack Sullivan, a founder of the William Alanson White Institute along with Erich Fromm, a one-time associate of the CIA-assisted Frankfurt School intellectuals.
After Harry Stack Sullivan died, Newton and Pearce left the William Alanson White Institute to found their cult, which was formally known as The Sullivan Institute therapeutic community. Newton ruled the community as a dictator, fathering ten children by different women and exploiting vulnerable people like Amy Siskind. How much of an aberration were Newton’s ideas from those of William Alanson White and his protegé Harry Stack Sullivan? Supporters of White and Sullivan say that Newton’s cult was completely out of step with these luminaries’ ideas, but I’m not so sure.
William Alanson White, courtesy of http://mikemcclaughry.wordpress.com
William Alanson White was a New York City surgeon who had two passions: the potential of Sigmund Freud’s work in psychoanalysis and the potential of Boris Sidis‘ work in hypnosis, mental illness and suggestibility. White promoted Freud’s ideas in the American medical community; he worked personally with Sidis while living in New York at the turn of the twentieth century. (Sidis did his work on hypnosis after Harvard, while he worked as an associate at the Pathological Institute of the New York State Hospitals.)
Beginning in the 1890s, New York and Boston were good places to study ‘mind-control’. At Harvard University, William James worked alongside Sidis to explore ‘exceptional mental states‘ and ‘suggestibility‘– how to control people through suggestion.
In New York, men like Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays were developing strategies to manipulate public opinion and control democracies from “behind the scenes”.
Bernays was a propagandist for the Woodrow Wilson administration, which came into power because Teddy Roosevelt, the ‘bull moose’, decided to run as a third presidential candidate in 1912. Readers will remember that after WWI, Teddy worked with Leonid Andreyev’s translator and murderer Herman Bernstein to blame the war on the Kaiser while Wilson built his brave new world at Versailles.
Sigmund Freud’s nephew and advertizing guru Edward Bernays.
During the first few decades of the twentieth century elitist East Coast circles were quite open about their desire to ‘take control’ of the American Experiment (look at the books they published!); their openness about their political aims was something that didn’t really change until the lead-in to WWII, which is why CIA counterintelligence head James Jesus Angleton focused on pre-war intelligence during his investigations into Soviet spy networks.
My point is that the seven MK ULTRA subprojects which investigated hypnosis would have started by looking at what Boris Sidis and his friends had done; Sidis was the most widely known and best connected researcher into hypnosis. If the destroyed MK ULTRA documents concerned the same topics Philip Zimbardo wrote about in On Resisting Social Influence, then White’s, Sidis’ and Bernays’ students/colleagues would have been highly desirable partners for the CIA.
Was William Alanson White the type of character who would lend his knowledge to a cause like Bernays’ democracy-manipulation, or to a project like MK ULTRA if he’d lived long enough? Here’s a quote from his autobiography about how he first won public prominence in NYC:
This element of publicity has been a rather interesting one in my career. The incident above cited [White’s appointment to a NY State medical committee] was not by any means the first experience I had of this sort. I got an unusual amount of attention from the press during my career as an ambulance surgeon. I figured in a number of rather dramatic incidents which made good copy, and I always got along very well with the fourth estate.
What type of a surgeon panders to the press with gory tales of their unfortunate patients? Not an ethical one.
Newspaper articles which appealed to base interests also appealed to Theodore Roosevelt, and White soon got Teddy’s patronage. White was given a position in Washington D.C. at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, a notorious asylum which after WWII would hold at least one political prisoner. White would also become president of the American Psychological Association (like Philip Zimbardo), an association which has had unsavory relations with the CIA since 1953 at least. White was an expert manipulator of federal funding and appropriations bodies; he left a well-endowed legacy to his protegés like Harry Stack Sullivan.
Harry Stack Sullivan spent his life as a Washington D.C. psychiatrist and political operator. Sullivan was a homosexual and worked hard to promote acceptance of homosexuals in the US military. As we know, the LGBT community currently plays a disproportionate role in the armed forces.
But there’s more to Sullivan than his work for the large LGBT community in Washington D.C.
Harry Stack Sullivan, thanks theglaringfacts.com
Sullivan studied with Freud and took Freud’s theories further with ‘interpersonal psychoanalysis‘, which involves analyzing people by looking at how they interact with others, particularly with their ‘significant other’, in hopes of providing insight into mental disorders.
It may interest regular readers to know that Heinz Kohut, the preeminent narcissism researcher whose work is referenced by the US military to explain the prevalence of narcissism in their ranks, has this to say about Narcissism and interpersonal relationships:
Patients with NPD [Narcissistic Personality Disorder] may have a history of many failed relationships secondary to disappointment that the relationship is not giving them the longed-for childhood gratification and their missing self object needs.7
7. Muslin MD, Hyman L. Heinz Kohut: Beyond the pleasure principle: Contributions to psychoanalysis. In: Reppen J, editor. Beyond Freud: A Study of Modern Psychoanalytic Theorists. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc; 1985. pp. 203–29.
Another way of interpreting what Kohut says is that people who suffer from narcissism tend to isolate themselves, or at least, are unlikely to form deep, lasting relationships with other people. Narcissism is a barrier to forming healthy families.
A little speculation on destroyed MK ULTRA research: It’s conceivable that a manipulator who is interested in exploiting a condition like narcissism could use Sullivan’s case histories for identifying patterns of behavior which may signify reliable ‘recruitment’ targets, for example, a person with a string of brief, failed marriages. After all, people with “NPD” don’t have it stamped on their forehead.
Much like Freud, Sullivan’s work had political implications. Sullivan declared that society was to blame for some mental illnesses; that social prejudices were at the heart of some individuals’ maladjustments– he wrote a paper on this titled The Illusion of Personal Individuality. (See p. 56 of Harry Stack Sullivan: Interpersonal Theory and Psychotherapy, by F. Barton Evans III.) The logical conclusion from Sullivan’s assertions is that society needs to change in order to ‘promote mental health’.
Before I move from Sullivan to Saul Newton, I’d like to make one last observation on Sigmund Freud. Much of Freud’s work has now been discredited, he was a coke-fiend who ‘theorized’ by imagining his motivations were the same as his clients. (If you’re interested, read The Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire, by Hans Eysenck.) However, while some of his ideas have dubious medical merit, I suggest that they are politically powerful and that’s why they haven’t been forgotten.
Consider, for instance, the ‘Oedipus Complex’. This is Encyclopedia Britannica’s definition of Freud’s term:
Oedipus complex, in psychoanalytic theory, a desire for sexual involvement with the parent of the opposite sex and a concomitant sense of rivalry with the parent of the same sex; a crucial stage in the normal developmental process. Sigmund Freud introduced the concept in his Interpretation of Dreams (1899).
Freud suggests that somewhere at the heart of every child’s relationship to their parent is a desire for incest. Freud’s highly controversial theory attacks the family bond by suggesting that deep down a child’s relation with their parent is an abusive sexual relationship, a relationship that inspires disgust. Since Freud had no scientific basis for this ugly assertion– he made up the Oedipal Complex based on a misreading of Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex– one has to wonder what, exactly, was Freud’s motivation? Has there ever been a more fundamental attack on the family?
Sigmund Freud, great showman but not-so-careful reader?
I encourage readers to review Siskind’s description of what the Sullivanians were about, and ask themselves if Newton and Pearce’s ideas really were so different from those of their idols White and Sullivan. After all, Newton’s community was free of the ‘neurosis-enducing’ nuclear family which passed on the arbitrary values of a ‘neurosis-enducing’ society…
Finally, on to Saul Newton himself.
Saul Newton was a Canadian who came into his own through Chicago’s revolutionary, communist circles. From Chicago, Newton joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, an American volunteer organization which fought with the Communists during the Spanish Civil War. (KGB/OSS agent Ernest Hemingway is famous for singing their praises.) The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was exceptionally well-connected amongst what would become the core of FDR’s Office of Strategic Services, and this University of Pennsylvania author estimates “At least 60 percent were members of the Young Communist League or CP [Communist Party].”
Now playing in Ferguson, MO! Thank you, horizontefbt.blogspot.com.
In 1957, after Newton had finished shooting Spaniards alongside OSS’ers and Communists, he got a job with a Freud-centered think-tank, married Jane Pearce and started his cult.
What type of people did Newton target for mind-control? Well, the daughter of well-known author James Agee, Julia Agee, for one. James Agee worked with Whittaker Chambers at TIME magazine, Clare Boothe Luce’s front for the CIA. In his biography, Witness, Chambers claims that he and James were the principal minds behind TIME’s book review section, as well as a “special projects” section:
Presently, a new post was devised for me. It was called Special Projects. It was a new department of the magazine whose staff consisted of my friend, James Agee, and me. Its purpose was to provide Time chiefly with cover stories which, because of the special difficulties of subject matter or writing, other sections of Time were thought to be less well equipped to handle.
Cough, cough, cough.
Readers will remember that Whittaker Chambers was a KGB agent who became an asset of J. Edgar Hoover and provided crucial testimony against other Soviet spies in the USA.
I don’t have a full list of Sullivanian members, but Julia Agee’s involvement alone suggests that Newton was targeting a population close to the ‘intelligence community’. (Julia’s father had committed suicide by the time of her involvement with the Sullivanians.)
What I hope I’ve shown is that the Sullivanians were a well-connected cult that inherited the ideas of well-connected Washington D.C. operators and targeted people who were within easy reach of the ‘intelligence community’. Newton chose to implement his control strategy with tactics that mirrored the beliefs of his idols and targeted victims’ relationship to their immediate parents, the strongest remaining family bond in the Western world.
But what about the rest of us, the people Quinn Norton characterizes as the “lesser people“, who aren’t part of the ‘intelligence community’? Are we victims of the same family-bashing?
A few years ago when I worked at a NYC think-tank, I attended a talk in which the head of the Chicago School System told an audience of New York bankers that Chi-town’s goal was to “take charge” of children as young as two years old, in order to prevent “bad influences” from parents, by which he meant ‘parents passing on their values to their children’. Since then, ‘early education’ specialists in my own community have announced their intention to roll out similar programs for two year olds. Their goal is ever-earlier intervention in the parent child bond.
But you don’t have to take my word for it, there are many examples of the US government taking over parental responsibilities. Consider Charlotte Iserbyt’s description of how Washington-approved sex education was sold; or social services’ ludicrously free hand in taking children from parents; or the state and federal governments’ increasingly early intervention in the education and health of children. These programs take over parents’ rights and responsibilities and put the State in charge instead– I’ve provided a few examples, but talk to anybody honest in education, social work or healthcare and you’ll find many more.
My time living overseas has taught me to suspect attacks on the family from the State. I suspect the motives of Washington D.C.-cronies who want to insert themselves in between a kid and their folks, because if there’s anything that the Sullivanians can teach the rest of us it’s that a bureaucracy can’t replace family and the results of trying to do so are devastating to kids– but very useful to exploitative organizations.
