On a wild life – Josh Raymond in TLS:

‘The Sullivanians: Sex, psychotherapy and the wild life of an American commune, by Alexander Stille, chronicles a psychotherapeutic community that later became a political theatre company, and almost certainly a cult, in the Upper West Side of New York between the mid-1950s and 1991. The Sullivan Institute’s early devotees included Jackson Pollock, Judy Collins and the dancer Lucinda Childs, and at its peak in the 1970s it had about 400 members. Named after the pioneering relational psychotherapist Harry Stack Sullivan (though he had no involvement), the Institute believed the nuclear family to be the root of all personal and societal ills. This idea had precedent. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), the Austrian psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich argued that the family is fascism’s cellular unit of organisation: the original in-group that precipitates an “us” and a “not-us”. In baby-boom America twenty years later, “family values” were in vogue, and so a countercultural riposte was probably inevitable. The Sullivanians preached the importance of multiple sexual partners, same-sex friendship, and that children should be raised by people other than their biological parents and educated at boarding school. Women who wanted to become pregnant would sleep with as many men as possible so that nobody would know who the child’s father was. Genetic inheritance was seen as unimportant; a loving environment was all.’

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‘The Sullivanians’ horrors are more insidious. It all starts off rather enjoyably, with lots of sex and “chumship”, and idyllic summers on Long Island. “It was like some giant millionaire’s house,” one interviewee recounts. “We had songwriting classes, art classes, yoga classes. There were parties. We’d go on outings to the beach or hike. Eat out at nice restaurants. You’d have dates. I met men I got to be friends with.” Everyone was in therapy several times a week and heard what they wanted to hear, which was to enjoy themselves and have a good time. Cutting off contact with one’s “dysfunctional” parents seemed like a small price to pay. Stille astutely calls it an extended adolescence, and it also feels like a sort of private members’ club do-over of university. Nobody has or is a parent, but personal development replaces academia, and everybody has enough cash. The problem is that youthful exploration ends: we graduate, we fall in love. The Sullivan Institute prohibited these. Members could become therapists or therapist-trainers, but were told they would never cope in the outside world. If two people showed preference for each other, they were derided for being “in a focus”, and told to see other people, who may have been their own or each other’s therapists. The rules toughened, children were sent away, and The Sullivanians comes to exemplify “one of the great themes of the twentieth century: the tendency for utopian projects of social liberation to take a totalitarian turn”.

As a 2020s psychotherapist it is easy to scoff. A cartoon of Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” has a bar underneath “Food, Water and Shelter” that reads “WiFi” and one below that saying “Battery”. In the psychotherapy-training version, you’d probably have “Don’t tell your clients what to do” and “Don’t have sex with them”. The problem with the first is that that people sometimes like being told: it is natural to miss the dependency of childhood, and to crave relief from the endlessness of our existential freedom. As one Sullivanian puts it, “I want to place my life in someone’s hands”. Demanding that one’s clients give one oral sex, as Sullivan Institute founder Saul Newton did daily, is far more disquieting to think about. The kindest take is that it was a catastrophic fallacy of composition, something that seemed to be a Sullivanian speciality, where he truth of “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” became “they always and only fuck you up” and the idea that sex can be very good turned into the terrible falsehood that it is always good.’

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‘Psychotherapists know that “cause” is a slippery notion. Does a person smoke “because” they have oral-gratification issues linked to early feeding, because nicotine is addictive or because smoking was what a favourite actor did? Or is it because their parents smoked, or were anti-smoking, or because the person unconsciously wants to damage their lungs which are organs of the Heart Chakra and, as my clinical supervisor once remarked, “all smokers are heartbroken”? The correct answer – the one that will unlock smoking for that person – is simply the one that feels like the truth. This makes general questions about the origins of mental illness incredibly hard to answer, something David Rosenthal wrestled with as he wrote his book (his pseudonym for the Morloks, “Genain”, compounds two Greek words meaning “dire birth”). Carl Morlok had an unhinged mother and an alcoholic father, and Sadie had to help her own mother raise six younger siblings, and was changing nappies from the age of four. Saul Newton’s father was a tyrant and his Sullivan Institute co-founder and third wife Jane Pearce suffered from severe postnatal depression. As Larkin’s poem goes on to say, “Man hands on misery to man”. Cultural errors like racism and misogyny make all of this far worse, and Farley criticizes the NIMH psychologists for claiming that German-born Carl’s brutal authoritarianism came from “feelings of personal inadequacy” rather than his being a Nazi. Nazism indeed feels like a truer explanation, but it is also true that Freudian theory, very fashionable in America at the time, is lousy at explaining why people do terrible things (Jung’s concept of the shadow, and Melanie Klein’s primary envy – the desire to destroy or devalue the thing you want in order to make you want it less – are both far better).’

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‘According to the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, knowledge comes in four varieties: propositional (knowing that), procedural (knowing how), perspectival (knowing how to see and pay attention) and participatory (knowing how to be in relationship with others and the world). Western intellectual culture privileges the first, pays lip service to the second and doesn’t know the other two exist. Therapists are not immune. It sometimes feels as though insight about a problem should mean that a client gets better, but it is rarely sufficient on its own. Books and psychotherapy are both heroes’ journeys: we enter the cave, we retrieve the elixir, we return. And the returning is very much the thing. As T. S. Eliot put it, “the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time”. We may learn as many facts as we please about the past – we can know that until our poor heads ache – but if we do not also glean information about how to do things, see the world and exist within our lives right now, then we will never have much hope of getting wiser. This in turn bodes ill for those we seek to nurture, be they our actual children or the future selves to whom we are constantly giving birth.’

Read the article here.

Cause is a slippery notion indeed. And at the same time so much of our behavior is explained by seemingly less pleasant experiences in our past. Just remember the popularity of the word ‘trauma’. The fact that two people with more or less the same experiences often develop completely different behavior patterns later in life is merely a disturbance to the theory.
We want to know the cause. And we think we know.

It’s true that insight and understanding might not be enough for healing, probably this is a very popular bias, understand your problems and they will disappear, going back to the Greek culture and the emphasis on self-knowledge, although their understanding of self-knowledge must have different from ours. But the second equally important question is: what do we mean by healing? Less suffering? Less unhappiness? Healthier appetites? Neither too much, nor too little.

It's probably not a good idea to have sex with your patients, but who knows, the affair between a psychologist and the patient might be as happy or unhappy as any other affair.

Perhaps all therapy should start with the question: do you want healing or seduction or a bit of both?