Philip Rieff (December 15, 1922 â July 1, 2006) was an American sociologist and cultural critic best known for his early-career work on Sigmund Freud and later criticisms of modern culture. He taught sociology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1961 until 1992 after briefer positions the University of Chicago, Brandeis University, and the University of California, Berkeley. He was the author of a number of books on Sigmund Freud and his legacy, including ' (1959) and The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (1966).
As a graduate instructor at the University of Chicago, he married his undergraduate student Susan Sontag after 10 days of courtship in 1950. The marriage lasted eight years. Sontag and Rieff had a son together, David Rieff, a writer and the editor of his mother's personal journals.
Philip Rieff was born on December 15, 1922 in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Lithuanian Jewish refugees. He attended the University of Chicago for both undergraduate and graduate study, earning a BA in 1946, an MA in 1947, and a PhD in political science in 1954. He first intended to be a sportswriter, specifically a baseball journalist, and his studies were interrupted for service in the US Army Air Force, where he was an attaché to an Air Force general.
Rieff taught at the University of Chicago until moving to Boston to teach at Brandeis University in 1952, then to the University of California, Berkeley in 1959 after a one-year fellowship at Stanford University. He settled for the remainder of his career at the University of Pennsylvania in 1961. There, he became University Professor of Sociology and then the named chair the Benjamin Franklin Professor; he retired emeritus in 1992. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1970.
Rieff's early career was defined by his analyses and critiques of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, particularly the books ' in 1959 and The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud in 1966. In addition to these, in the same period he edited a ten-volume edition of Freud's collected works that was published by Collier Books in 1963.
Freud was immediately well-received. Harvard psychologist Henry Murray's review in the American Sociological Review declared it "remarkably subtle and substantial" and the "product of profound analytic thought," while Berkeley sociologist and psychoanalyst Neil Smelser recalled "the work seemed to be on everybody's lips, and was generally believed to be the best and most important critical reading of Freud yet." Rieff's moralistic interpretation of Freud was contrasted with psychoanalysts's scientific interpretations, Lionel Trilling's tragic interpretation, and Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown's radical political interpretations. As the title suggested, Rieff viewed Freud as first of all a moralist, but an ironic moralist of an unusual kind facing a crisis of prior moral cultures: facing the impossibility of maintaining substantive, positive moral communities on past bases of faith in religious or scientific grounding. Rieff credited Freud with developing a new, faithless therapeutic mentality to meet this crisis, one that recast questions of good and evil into questions of healthy and sick.
Near the end of his life in 2003, Rieff's work was the topic of a special issue of the Journal of Classical Sociology: vol. 3 no. 3, "The significance of Philip Rieff."
As a graduate instructor at the University of Chicago, Rieff met Susan Sontag as a seventeen-year-old undergraduate auditing one of his classes, and they married after a 10-day romance in 1950. She later wrote of him that "he was the first person with whom she could ever really talk." Sontag and Rieff had a son together born 1952, David Rieff, a writer and the editor of his mother's personal journals. The marriage lasted eight years until divorce in 1959, after a year in which Rieff had taken a fellowship at Stanford University while Sontag had traveled to Paris.
In 1963, Rieff married Alison Douglas Knox (1933âÂÂ2011), an Oxford graduate and professor of philosophy and later a lawyer (JD 1977), and they remained married for over forty years until his death.
Rieff died of heart failure on July 1, 2006 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His wife Alison survived him; she died December 12, 2011. Rieff's correspondence is held at the University of Pennsylvania's Kislak Center for Special Collections.