id Susan Sontag write her then-husband Philip Rieff’s first book, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959)? That’s the assertion in Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work, published last month by Ecco. It’s a serious accusation. As an admirer of The Mind of the Moralist, I was intrigued by what the newly opened question of its authorship might mean for both Rieff’s and Sontag’s legacies. What I discovered was unexpected, and a little disconcerting.
Sontag needs no introduction, although Rieff might: He is probably better known now as Sontag’s one-time partner than as an intellectual in his own right. The two met when Sontag was a 17-year-old student and Rieff a 28-year-old sociology instructor at the University of Chicago; married, after a very brief courtship; had a son, the journalist David Rieff; and parted ways (bitterly, by all accounts) after eight years of marriage. Rieff’s scholarly reputation rests primarily on two books, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (based on his doctoral dissertation and completed during his marriage to Sontag) and his second book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (1966), a dyspeptic polemic against modernity in the guise of a study of post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory.
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