broken bones
"underneath all this fancy talk and ideology, this was a family"
If you know New York, you know that Broadway between 96th Street and 100th Street (110th on a bad day) is the Twilight Zone of the Upper West Side. There’s something dead about that stretch of Broadway, something mournful, something ill.
It’s easy to believe that a cult once lived on the corner of 100 and Broadway—right across from Broadway Bagel—because they’ve packed their bags but their eerie unwellness lingers.
If you like Only Murders in the Building, you’ll love the dark psychedelic The Sullivanians, which also tells recounts the horrifying true crimes of an Upper West Side apartment building. Only this one happens to house a commune of therapists and their clients-cum-lovers.
The Sullivan Institute—named for Harry Stack Sullivan, the founder of the White Institute—was created in 1957 by Jane Pearce, a student of Sullivan’s, and her husband, Saul Newton (not his real name). Pearce was a doctor and psychiatrist, and the third wife of Newton, a charismatic con artist with a traumatic upbringing and a penchant for therapeutic tyranny (and frequent fellatio, most often provided by his patients, even into his limp eighties).
The Sullivanians metastasized into a small Upper West Side empire of forced free love, child separation, and the supposed utopia that was supposed to commence after breaking free of the post-war straightjacket of the nuclear family. Many of the Institute’s patients arrived from abusive, estranged, or painful family situations. But, in the case of the Sullivanians, the “cure” was just as painful as the disease.
Saul Newton had no training in psychoanalysis or any other kind of therapy, but, hey, this is America, and so a man’s not going to let a few pieces of paper come between him and telling other people what to do and charging exorbitant hourly rates for said advice.
The Sullivanian credo, played according to Newton’s particular theme and variation, created very cult-like conditions: your parents are murderous and hateful, so cut them off, even if you don’t want to, under the watchful eye of said therapist (except when the cult you need money—write a letter home), you should loosen up and have sex with multiple people (including myself, your therapist) to say no to sex is being close-minded and possessive (much like your mother must have been toward you), becoming exclusive or developing feelings with someone is verboten, and if you are allowed to have a child (by your therapist), have sex with multiple men in your fertile window so you’re not sure who the father is, and send the child away to boarding school at age five.
Oh, and don’t forget: you would be nothing and wouldn’t survive without this therapy and its community around it.
A Catholic Worker recently noted to me that in the 1980s, the men on the street began to change. Previously, the most challenging guests had been alcoholics. But then, after the Vietnam War, the most challenging guests were (and still are) those who are suffering from severe mental illnesses, from attenuated connections to reality. Their tethers to the rest of the world are emaciated, ragged, and raw. They are holding on, as the cliché goes, by a thread. And as you rub against them day after day, the friction builds. Mental illness isn’t catching, per se, but it does have fallout you can’t control or predict. Sometimes—often—in its untreated proximity you can become another raw nerve, too. Your own tether to reality begins to feel a bit threadbare.
Imagine this happening over the course of a century. The traumas of World Wars, epidemics, a continental depression, genocides and murders, despair and hopelessness live in the bodies of our very recent ancestors, of our neighbors. How could we possibly conceive of the fact that their children, neighbors, and loved ones would escape the toxic fallout that dwells in their bodies? Violence, like energy, travels in a closed system.
And something is, surely, deeply wrong, on a system-wide level. We can feel it in our bones. In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel Van Der Kolk makes the astute and chilling observation that child abuse is the silent epidemic in American life.
Stephanie Foo’s blood-curdling, soul-aching What My Bones Know tells a particularly Asian-American version of this story, as she examines—with pellucid courage and empathic self-examination—the frequent inhumane beatings she received at the hands of her parents. Her parents, like many of her friends’ parents in the Silicon Valley diaspora of the 90s, had generations of war, starvation, and desperate deeds for the sake of survival etched into their genetic heritage.
What My Bones Knew is the book everyone would write if they could. It is clear-minded, embodied—the product of a brave mind and strong soul, who isn’t afraid to stare her worst memories in the face and root them out of the corner of her body and in the staggered breath where they hide. We are probably familiar with those memories as well: we see them spill out of those quiet corners when they surface in the middle of a grumpy Sunday night dinner, triggered by a missed message, a slammed door, a frustrated sigh. They erupt like toxic sludge from the past into our present.
At the moment when Stephanie Foo described her first EMDR session in detail, I found myself weeping along with her. Partly because she doesn’t describe her nightmarish treatment by her abusive parents, but the more subtle, universal feelings underneath: the feeling of holding the emotional weight of people older than you who should know better. She writes of the particular pain of a child tasked with being the scapegoat: with bearing the loneliness or self-loathing of an adult too weak to face their own pain.
In her book, Foo charts the way she took it upon herself to break the cycle of violence that was her heritage. She, like the scapegoat, takes the sins of her community on her back. But the scapegoat, running through the desert, finds her way to an oasis. And thrives.
I can’t help but compare Foo’s book with Stille’s. Foo notes that her experience is a response to the pain of a cycle of violence. And so, indeed, is the Sullivanians’. In the 1950s, a new burst of industrial capitalism severed from the life of the home by the neat division of office and suburb and a rabid emphasis on national conformity in the face of the perduring foe of Communism did twist the nuclear family into a Sears and Roebuck-ed prison of materialistic, patriarchal acquisition. As the managerial class grew, factory farming and its supermarkets exploded, and cities expanded into suburbs, American families were increasingly dependent upon the financial markets and less and less self-sufficient or tied to their land—or to each other—in a meaningful way. Gender roles calcify, and, despite the boom of babies, society turns sterile.
The isolation and despair of suburban women during this time is well-documented. It’s no wonder that the counter-culture that burst forth in the 1960s tried to break free of the social structure that had been coopted so thoroughly into perpetuating the hegemony of the state: the family.
But the Sullivanians show, in extremis, a dysfunction that haunts all communal living experiments of American counter-culture: you can’t escape family.
In the second chapter of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, the author discusses the many counter-cultural communes during the 1960s and 70s (the Sullivanian being one of them, though not an example she discusses). While the communes began with great hopes of producing an egalitarian utopia, they inevitably became a toxic patriarchy. Their founder—or usurper—(and, yes, generally a man) would enact his own expulsion or exclusion from the broader society by casting out the heretics among the commune who disagreed with the orthodoxy of the group, which was narrow and aligned conspicuously congruently with his vision.
Too many counter-cultural communities end up just looking like dysfunctional and abusive families that so many of their members have fled. In the end, the fascist father and unloving mother haunt even those who try to escape them.
The revolution that the Sullivanian therapists were selling (at a steep hourly rate) were power and sex. And empowerment and fulfillment of all the desires to be loved were marketed in the melting of the person into a collective and falling under the sway of a new abusive parent—the cult’s elected therapists.
But what if family, intimacy, and love, are not bourgeois fictions, but the deepest irradiations of the human need and capacity for belonging?
Stephanie Foo’s book argues deeply that we are made for family systems. Just because parents are abusive doesn’t mean the need for parents go away. It is only by integrating our past scars from an abusive family unit into a new family unit of some kind that we find healing.
I’ll file a disagreement with Tolstoy here: there are only families. And happy families may all be alike, but unhappy families—at least this century—are all wounded in the exact same way.
In the case of the Sullivanians, the urge for a parent drove the patients straight into the arms of the despot Saul Newton, who separated children from their mothers and lovers and spouses from one another.
If Newton didn’t get a family, it seemed, no one will.
Cults, Stille notes, are opposed to traditional monogamy and even the private bond of a couple (the Sullivanian therapists and community members would accuse lovers or secret couples of being in “a focus”). He notes that these bonds threaten the power of the cult leader, and so cults tend to have strange rules governing the sex life of adherents—forced celibacy, forced polyamory—as one Sullivanian survivor noted, the underlying message was: “your body is not your own.” Which is, of course, one of the key messages underlying physical and sexual abuse: that you do not have bodily autonomy or bodily integrity, your existence is contingent upon the goodwill and whims of another. You are not yours, you are mine. Your body is not your own, I can do with it what I please.
That is a horrifying message. One straight out of hell.
It’s one I saw play out in an empty movie theatre several weeks ago. I love Yorgos Lanthimos’ films. Poor Things is a delightful romp through what it means to be human and be both alive and living. I highly recommend seeing it in an empty movie theatre at 4 pm where the only other patron in the theatre leaves halfway through for reasons unknown. But Lanthimos’ films disturb me. They’re not horror, but they’re horrifying. His movies are cruelly obsessed with the permeability and malleability of the human body to outside forces. Men and women often become animals in his film—both through physical intervention and their own psychic malformation.
But is that not the lesson the hell of the twentieth century left us with: that humans can become animals—our bodies are not safe and not our own. How is it possible the world could have survived global collective punishments of such large proportions and our families not eventually come to reflect the horrors and shellshock so many of their members perpetuated on foreign soil?
Violence, like energy, travels in a closed system.
The Sullivanians shows what happens when that cycle of trauma continues in its unending loop, unabated. But that’s not the full story.
While violence operates like thermodynamics—tit for tat, eye for eye, blow for blow—love operates outside on a system all its own. Grace comes from outside: it becomes possible to create a world where you absorb the many slings and arrows of the pain whirring through our genetic atmosphere and yet wring out life, watering the earth beneath you not with fire but with tenderness.
Foo’s book shows the steep cost to one’s soul of breaking the cycles of violence. It shows the sorrow of forgiveness. But also demonstrates that the real revolution is the real conversion. It is possible—somehow—to step outside that claustrophobic system of intergenerational horror—to decide that anger will not be returned, misplaced, diffused or passed on, but to choose to love, with all its unfairness and its unclosed wounds.
Stigmata are indelible. But it’s possible to let them stop on your skin, and instead of tattooing mirror wounds on your neighbors, to make a thing of beauty.
A young Catholic Worker told me—I’m not sure that community life is possible without vows. She is no stranger to community life—to its ups and downs. To the chronically disenfranchised looking for a little bit of power. To the cynics and wounded souls who flock to hospitality brought to the margins like moths to a flame.
I have been pondering those words for a better part of a year—because, in some sense, I think she is right. All Christian life is premised upon vows. All Christians began their life in God with their baptismal vows—we are reminded of them each year, when we remake them in the presence of the Resurrection—on the feast that marks the opening up of this other system of life with God rather than our closed loop of retribution.
But I wonder, too, if what we’re looking for is a covenant. The meaning that comes from belonging to a community that has outlined its walk with God and takes it seriously. It’s a task that is fundamentally social but also comes from our most human core.
The heart is the dwelling place where I am, where I live; according to the Semitic or Biblical expression, the heart is the place "to which I withdraw."
The heart is our hidden center, beyond the grasp of our reason and of others;
only the Spirit of God can fathom the human heart and know it fully.
The heart is the place of decision, deeper than our psychic drives.
It is the place of truth, where we choose life or death.
It is the place of encounter, because as an image of God we live in relation:
it is the place of covenant.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, §22563
What does the just society look like? What does a healthy family look like?
Although ink has been spilled on these questions since the dawn of time and will continue to run until its sunset, perhaps the most innovative, comprehensive and compelling answers we have ever received to those questions are the 47 chapters of law handed down in the Torah through Hebrew Scriptures.
Those chapters are the connective tissue of a covenant—the skeletal system for a family.