Philip Rieff (December 15, 1922 – July 1, 2006) was an American sociologist and cultural critic, who taught sociology at the
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...
from 1961 until 1992, and also, during the 1950s, at the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...
.
He was the author of a number of books on
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud ( ; ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies seen as originating fro ...
and his legacy, including ''
Freud: The Mind of the Moralist'' (1959) and ''The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud'' (1966).
At the University of Chicago, he married his 17-year-old student
Susan Sontag
Susan Lee Sontag (; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, critic, and public intellectual. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on "Camp", Notes on 'Ca ...
after 10 days of courtship in the 1950s. 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. Rieff's second wife and widow, Alison Douglas Knox, died December 12, 2011.
Works
*''
Freud: The Mind of the Moralist'', 1959.
*''Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud'' (ed.). Collier Books, 1963.
*''The Triumph of the Therapeutic''. Harper & Row, 1966.
*''Fellow Teachers''. Harper & Row, 1973.
*''The Feeling Intellect''. University of Chicago Press, 1990.
*''My Life Among the Deathworks''. University of Virginia Press, 2006.
*''Charisma''. Pantheon, 2007.
* ''The Crisis of the Officer Class''. University of Virginia Press, 2007.
* ''The Jew of Culture''. University of Virginia Press, 2008.
Notes
Further reading
*Aeschliman, M.D., “The Aesthetics of Moloch,” National Review, 17 July 2006, 41–2.
*Imber, Jonathan B. (ed.). ''Therapeutic Culture: Triumph and Defeat''. Transaction, 2004.
*Manning, Philip. ''Freud and American Sociology''. Polity Press, 2005.
*Zondervan, A. A. W. ''Sociology and the Sacred. An Introduction to Philip Rieff's Theory of Culture''. University of Toronto Press, 2005.
External links
*Beer, Jeremy
Pieties of Silence ''
The American Conservative''
Philip Rieff correspondence at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rieff, Philip
Rieff, Phillip
Rieff, Phillip
American male non-fiction writers
American sociologists
Brandeis University faculty
Harvard University faculty
Jewish American non-fiction writers
University of Chicago alumni
University of Pennsylvania faculty