The Fourth Wall, the Custody Cases and the Historians

The Sullivan Institute's public face in its later years was a theatre. The Fourth Wall Repertory Company, run by Joan Harvey, staged political musicals in the East Village while functioning as the community's cultural arm, and the fourth floor buildings on the Upper West Side where members lived in single sex apartments housed what was by then less a therapy practice than a total community of several hundred professionals. Its doctrines about the family produced its legal history. Teaching that the nuclear family was the root of pathology, the leadership directed members to limit contact with parents, managed sexual pairings, and treated children as the community's rather than the couple's, boarding many out or raising them by rota. When members left, custody fights followed, and the cases of the 1980s, in which departing parents fought the community and sometimes their own former spouses for their children, brought the group its first sustained press scrutiny, including coverage of members' flight from the city with children during the disputes.

The community declined after founder Saul Newton's death in 1991 and dissolved within a year or two. Its history has since been written twice over: by former members, whose accounts and a documentary by a child of the group reckon with what growing up there cost, and by Alexander Stille, whose 2023 book The Sullivanians reconstructed the whole arc from radical psychoanalysis to closed community, restoring to view a group that had hidden in plain sight in Manhattan for forty years.