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.
Early life and education
Philip Rieff was born on December 15, 1922 in Chicago, Illinois,[1] the son of Lithuanian Jewish refugees.[2] 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.[2][3] 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.[2][3][4]
Rieff's early career was defined by his analyses and critiques of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, particularly the books Freud: The Mind of the Moralist in 1959 and The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud in 1966.[2][4][6][9][10] 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.[11]
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,"[12] 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."[2] 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.[13][14][15] 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.[13][16] 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.[16][17]
The Triumph of the Therapeutic continued Rieff's exploration of therapeutic mentalities and morality, focusing critically on three claimed moral successors and critics of Freud: Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, and D. H. Lawrence.[18] In contrast to Freud's faithless moralism, Rieff presented each of these successors as would-be creators of new faiths and new communities of moral commitment to those new faiths – but also as failures in their attempts.[13][16][19]
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."[20]
Personal life and death
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.[2][6] She later wrote of him that "he was the first person with whom she could ever really talk."[6] Sontag and Rieff had a son together born 1952, David Rieff, a writer and the editor of his mother's personal journals.[6][21] 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.[6]
In 1963, Rieff married Alison Douglas Knox (1933–2011), an Oxford graduate and professor of philosophy and later a lawyer (JD 1977), and they remained married for over forty years until his death.[2][4][6][22]
Rieff, Philip (April 1951). "The Meaning of History and Religion in Freud's Thought". The Journal of Religion. 31 (2): 114–131. JSTOR1197638.
Rieff, Philip (July 1953). "Aesthetic Functions in Modern Politics". World Politics. 5 (4): 478–502. doi:10.2307/2009180. JSTOR2009180.
Rieff, Philip (Winter 1954). "George Orwell and the Post-Liberal Imagination". The Kenyon Review. 16 (1): 49–70. JSTOR4333463.
Rieff, Philip (April 1956). "The Origins of Freud's Political Psychology". Journal of the History of Ideas. 17 (2): 235–249. doi:10.2307/2707744. JSTOR2707744.
Rieff, Philip (Fall 1972). "Fellow Teachers". Salmagundi (20): 5–85. JSTOR40546710.
Rieff, Philip (Fall–Winter 1982). "VII A Last Word: The Impossible Culture: Wilde As A Modern Prophet". Salmagundi (58/59): 406–426. JSTOR40547581.[23]
Rieff, Philip (Spring–Summer 1987). "For the Last Time Psychology: Thoughts on the Therapeutic Twenty Years After". Salmagundi (74/75): 101–117. JSTOR40547954.
↑Linville, Susan E. (Autumn 1990). ""Truth is the Daughter of Time": Formalism and Realism in Lear's Last Scene". Shakespeare Quarterly. 41 (3): 314. doi:10.2307/2870481. JSTOR2870481.
123King 1976, p.292, "Rieff capped off his study by suggesting that the cultural influence of Freud had been to produce a cultural type—psychological man—who would become the representative figure in American society. Unlike Lionel Trilling, who claimed Freud for the party of tragedy, or Marcuse and Norman Brown, who saw in Freud the potential for a radical critique of society, Rieff's ideal-type was beyond tragedy, politics, and even, by implication, culture."; "Rieff traced the attempts of followers of Freud to forge a remissive vision—the therapeutic—to replace both the old creedal culture and the spare and unconsoling demands of the "analytic attitude," the cast of mind which Freud had represented."
↑Kleinschmidt 1966, pp.247–248, "A more balanced view of man and his culture was summed up by Lionel Trilling in his Freud Anniversary Lecture of 1955."; "Although the author shows at times keen insights into Freud's revolutionary contribution to man's understanding of himself, he makes the fundamental error of confusing scientific or analytic methodology with Freud's discoveries arrived at through the application of this scientific methodology."
123Manning 2003, p.240, "Rieff believes that the impetus for positive communities has been lost, and they have been largely replaced by negative communities. Whereas positive communities try to transform individuals, negative communities only inform them. As a result, there is no prospect of salvation. What is left is merely therapy (1968: 73). Rieff’s title, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, is now understandable: therapy’s triumph is a result of the failure of positive communities to provide salvation."
↑Kleinschmidt 1966, p.252, "Although it is hardly possible to agree with the author's choice of successor-critics of Freud, he is indeed brilliant at assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Jung, Reich, and Lawrence."
↑Smelser 2007, p.222, "Most of the substance of that book is an attempt to demonstrate that others – notably Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, and D. H. Lawrence – had resisted that mentality, had broken from and fought with the Freudian view, and had attempted to reinstitute the dimension of faith into cultural analysis, thus countering the triumph of the therapeutic. However, in the last chapter of Triumph, a chapter with the same title as the book itself, he did announce the triumph of the therapeutic"
↑Aeschliman 2006, p.42, "Rieff's essay "The Impossible Culture: Wilde as a Modern Prophet" is perhaps the best short introduction to his thought and chief themes."
Sources
Aeschliman, M.D. (17 July 2006). "The Aesthetics of Moloch". National Review. Vol.58, no.13. p.41–42.
Fine, Gary Alan; Manning, Philip (2003). "Preserving Philip Rieff: The Reputation of a Fellow Teacher". Journal of Classical Sociology. 3 (3): 227–233. doi:10.1177/1468795X03003300.
Glenn, David (November 11, 2005). "Prophet of the 'Anti-Culture'". Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved December 11, 2010.
Hawtree, Christopher (August 1, 2006). "Obituary: Philip Rieff". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 March 2026.
Kleinschmidt, Hans J. (Fall 1966). "Beyond Philip Rieff: The Triumph of Sigmund Freud". American Imago. 23 (3): 244–256. JSTOR26302408.
Lapsley, James N. (January 1967). "Review: The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud, by Philip Rieff". Theology Today. 23 (4): 573. doi:10.1177/0040573667023004.
Manning, Philip (November 2003). "Philip Rieff's Moral Vision of Sociology From Positive to Negative Communities – and Back?". Journal of Classical Sociology. 3 (3): 235–246. doi:10.1177/1468795X030033002.
Smelser, Neil J. (September 2007). "Philip Rieff: The Mind of a Dualist". Social Psychology Quarterly. 70 (3): 221–229. JSTOR20141785.
Further reading
Batchelder, William G. and Harding, Michael (eds.). The Philosophy of Philip Rieff: Cultural Conflict, Religion, and the Self. Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.
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.
