Philip Rieff

Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Miscellaneous Other Philip Rieff (December 15, 1922 – July 1, 2006) was an American sociologist and cultural critic, who taught sociology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1961 until 1992, and also, during the 1950s, at the University of Chicago.

He was the author of a number of books on Sigmund Freud 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 after 10 days of courtship in the 1950s.

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.