Philip Rieff

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 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^[5] after a one-year fellowship at Stanford University.^[6] He settled for the remainder of his career at the University of Pennsylvania in 1961.^[6] There, he became University Professor of Sociology^[7] and then the named chair the Benjamin Franklin Professor; he retired emeritus in 1992.^[2] He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969.^[8]

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]

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 died of heart failure on July 1, 2006 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.^[1][6] His wife Alison survived him; she died December 12, 2011.^[22] Rieff's correspondence is held at the University of Pennsylvania's Kislak Center for Special Collections.^[5]