NEW YORK -- The custody trial of a father trying to wrest his 6-year-old son from a Manhattan psychotherapy cult opened Monday with bizarre testimony about communal sex and a social policy outlawing the nuclear family.
A former member of the little-known Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, a cult of about 200 members based on Manhattan's Upper West Side, offered a glimpse into their unorthodox lifestyle at the trial in state Supreme Court in Manhattan.
'Monogamy was considered bad,' testified Michael Cohen, a senior research analyst who worked as a Sullivanian therapist in 1972 before fleeing the cult.
'Over the course of a week, you would have three or four different lovers.'
Most cult members are professionals such as doctors and lawyers, and former disciples reportedly include singer Judy Collins and artist Jackson Pollock.
Sullivanian leader Saul Newton directs the cult's disciples to reproduce and chooses partners.
The cult also allows parents to spend only an hour or two a day with their babies. The rest of the time the children are tended by Sullivanian baby-sitters.
Parental possessiveness is outlawed and punishable by having children removed completely from their parents.
Cohen was the first witness to testify in the trial of former cult member Paul Sprecher, who is battling his former wife Julia Agee, daughter of the late writer James Agee, for custody of their son.
Agee, a cult member who is remarried, claims she is raising her children in a traditional family.
'She's a good mother,' her lawyer, O. Stephen Paganuzzi, said in his opening argument to Justice Walter Schackman.
'What does it have to do with this child, this political battle between two groups?'
Cohen testified the cult's social policies are based on the philosophy that a mother's love is lethal.
'The maternal love for the infant ... is considered to be a violence against the child,' said Cohen. It's a 'thin veneer for a mother's real death wishes for her children.'
Sullivanians believe infants are 'less depressed' than adults and that threatens adults, creating anxiety, Cohen said. As a result of mounting anxiety and tension, he said, 'ultimately, the child would be dead.'
The institute was formed in 1957 by Newton and his then-wife, Jane Pearce. It has since taken up residence in several buildings on Manhattan's trendy Upper West Side.
The group's approach diverged radically from the ideas of its namesake, prominent psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan, who died in 1949.
It is a society where 'woman have no control over their reproductive processes' and 'men are nothing more than sperm banks,' said Sprecher's lawyer, Sanford Katz in his opening statement.
'It is a sick, insane, revolting group that indulges in bizarre practices and maintains a manic, bunker mentality,' Katz said.
