Philip Rieff (December 15, 1922 – July 1, 2006) was an American sociologist and cultural critic, who taught sociology at theUniversity of Pennsylvania from 1961 until 1992, and also, during the 1950s, at theUniversity of Chicago.
He was the author of a number of books onSigmund Freud and his legacy, includingFreud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) andThe Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (1966).
At the University of Chicago, he married his 17-year-old studentSusan Sontag 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.[1] Rieff's second wife and widow, Alison Douglas Knox, died December 12, 2011.[2]
Aeschliman, M.D., “The Aesthetics of Moloch,” National Review, 17 July 2006, 41–2.
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.
