My Father the Cult Leader
Saul B. Newton
Born Saul Cohen in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1906, Saul B. Newton was an experimental American psychotherapist who led one of Manhattan’s most infamous cults, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis. From a sprawling Upper West Side complex, Newton forced members (called Sullivanians) to sever family ties, surrender control of their children, and engage in a nonmonogamous lifestyle. At the height of its popularity, in the 1970s, the institute counted hundreds of members, but by the ’90s, beset by Newton’s failing health and multiple lawsuits, it dissolved. Newton, who died at age eighty-five in 1991, was married—and divorced—six times and had ten children, of whom Esther is the eldest.
if you know anything about my father, Saul Newton, it’s probably that he founded a group called the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis—a group that many people, myself included, came to view as a cult. For over thirty years, starting in 1957, Saul ran the institute with Jane Pearce, the woman for whom he left my mother when I was eight years old.
Saul wasn’t my biological father, but he was the only father I knew. He came into the picture when I was six or seven. He was tall and very handsome, with big dark eyes and strong features. My biological father, a Communist named William Miller, refused to marry my mother, Virginia, because she wasn’t Jewish. And so, Saul became my dad.
Saul moved in with my mother just after he returned from World War II. With his army uniform and the gun he had brought back from Europe kept in the closet, he was a big deal to me. I was very impressed by him and loved him immediately. By the time he left my mother, just a few years after he first came into our lives, he had already adopted me. So though he and my mother divorced, and he would go on to have many more wives and children, he was still my dad and clung to me for the rest of his life.
Saul, who had trained as a social worker, was heavily influenced by Harry Stack Sullivan, a neo-Freudian psychotherapist who believed that peer groups were just as important as families. What my father added to Sullivan’s philosophy was a denunciation of the nuclear family—particularly, the mother-child bond—and, accordingly, a rejection of monogamy. He thought the secret to happiness was breaking up the family unit, and he created the institute on the Upper West Side as a place to put his philosophy into practice. All the therapists and patients who lived at the institute were forced to surrender to my dad’s decisions when it came to raising—and conceiving—their own children. He would decide who should have children with whom, where they would live, and the rules by which they were raised.
Even though my dad preached against the family unit and ruthlessly enforced his philosophy with others, he exempted himself from his own teachings. In fact, he was a very engaged father. He taught me how to box, which wasn’t traditional for a girl. He took me to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, where I sat on his shoulders to watch the floats go by. He taught me how to ride a bike and, when I was just seven years old, how to steer the family car.
As a young girl, I lived with my mother and was thus kept at arm’s length from the activity at the institute. However, one summer, my father and Jane invited me to join them at the house they had built in Barnes Landing in Amagansett, New York. I remember that there was a group of shrinks and analysts who would come out. They’d hang out in the living room, which had lovely views of the bay, and drink—a lot. I presume, though I don’t know for sure because I went to my bedroom to sleep, that they had sex with one another. That was my first exposure to my father’s followers, and I was disgusted.
As a leader and as a father, Saul was tough. He had no patience for fear. I remember that the day he taught me to ride a bicycle, he sat me on the seat, and I was saying, “Daddy! Daddy! Don’t let go.” And he did, and I fell. And then he said, “Get back up. You can do it.” And I did it. He also had a hideous temper and could become violent. One day, we went on a walk on a country path in Maine, where we spent our summers. Toward the end of it, I got tired, and I started to whine. That was something he hated. Hated. He took a stick off the ground and said, “You walk ahead of me, and if you get any closer to me than this stick, I’m going to hit you.” The message, which I definitely absorbed, was that I had to toughen up.
My father used to rationalize everything. He’d say, “I need to lose my temper. It’s good for my mental health.” But it wasn’t good for mine. When I was a teenager, I had a meltdown at a summer music camp. I was passionately in love with this girl who did not return my affection. I made a scene in the camp’s dining room and they sent me to Austen Riggs, a psychiatric institution. I called my dad from there and he got on the phone and said, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” It was tough love, but that was him. Eventually he came to pick me up.
Saul and Esther in New York City’s Central Park, circa 1946
My last conversation with my father was shortly before he died in 1991. He had dementia and couldn’t recognize me. He had been kicked out by his sixth wife; he had been kicked out by his girlfriend. He had been kicked out of a nursing home and then a hospital for being violent. He had landed in a hospital in Brooklyn. My brother Rob and I were the ones who visited and brought him clean clothes. I was the one who, seeing that he was suffering, signed the DNR. When he died, I was the one who made sure he received an obituary in the New York Times. My dad was an amazing, complicated, brilliant individual. It was important to me that he wasn’t remembered only as a nutjob with a cult. It was important that, though he spent decades trying to pry families apart, his family—at least I, his adopted daughter—was there for him.