Rieff, Philip

An American social theorist and analyst of culture, Philip Rieff (b. 1922) is best known for two acclaimed books on Freud and his influence on twentieth-century culture, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) and The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (1966), and as the editor of the 10-volume edition, The Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud (1963). Educated at the University of Chicago and for many years a member of the sociology faculty at the University of Pennsylvania (1961–1993), Rieff is a wide-ranging theorist who has focused on developing a concept of culture that draws heavily from the humanities and religious sources. Within the discipline of sociology, Rieff is most deeply indebted to the works of Max Weber and Charles Horton ...