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That's patreon.com slash ghost town pod. A New York state of mind. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca

Lieb. And this is Ghost Town.

And this is Ghost Town. Manhattan's Upper West Side is known for many things.

Central Park, posh apartments, and a way of life that seems romantic, bourgeois, almost untouchable.

Most people don't think of the Upper West Side as a breeding ground of a psychoanalytical cult, one that gripped hundreds of affluent New York intellectuals

at their most vulnerable. And yet, here we are. At its peak in the mid to late 70s, a therapeutic

institute with as many as 600 patient members

clustered in apartment buildings on Manhattan's Upper West Side, touting polyamory,

communal living, partying, group parenting, and extreme socialist politics

through the deep psychoanalytic work of Harry Sullivan and his egomaniacal disciple, Saul Newton. Today on Ghost Town,

a metropolitan cult of the most disturbing order, the Sullivanians. In the 1950s, the U.S.,

specifically New York City, had a huge preoccupation with psychoanalysis and therapy. Time magazine

had put Freud on its cover three times between

1924 and 1956, and Americans were hungry for new ideas, explaining a post-war thirst for knowledge,

answers, and clarity. Freud's thinking especially impacted the white-collar social circles of New York

City, which at the time had the largest concentration

of psychoanalysts in the United States. Herbert, known as Harry Sullivan, was one such analyst to

worship Freud's teachings, an American neo-Froidian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who held that, quote,

personality can never be isolated from the complex interpersonal

...