Freud: The Mind of the Moralist

Freud: The Mind of the Moralist

Cover of the first edition
Author	Philip Rieff
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Sigmund Freud
Published	1959 (Anchor Books)
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	441 (1961 edition)
ISBN

Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959; second edition 1961) is a book about Sigmund Freud by the sociologist Philip Rieff, who described his motive in writing it as being to "show the mind of Freud, not the man or the movement he founded, as it derives lessons on the right conduct of life from the misery of living it." Rieff placed Freud and psychoanalysis in a larger historical context. One of Rieff's most influential writings, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist has been called "brilliant" and a "great book". It established Rieff's reputation and helped place Freud at the center of moral and philosophical inquiry. The writer Susan Sontag, Rieff's wife during the period the book was written, contributed to it to such an extent that she has been considered an unofficial co-author.

Rieff described the "motive and main point" of his book as being to "show the mind of Freud, not the man or the movement he founded, as it derives lessons on the right conduct of life from the misery of living it." Rieff interprets Freud as a conservative. He portrays Freud as "heir to the tradition of Montaigne, Burton, Hobbes, and La Rouchefoucauld, a man deeply impressed by the limitations of the intellect and the obstinacy of the passions." Rieff saw Freud as an advocate of psychic compromise, who believed that people should make the best of an inevitably unhappy fate. Rieff admired Freud for what he saw as his sober realism.

M. D. Aeschliman, writing in National Review, compared Freud: The Mind of the Moralist to the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death (1973) and the psychologist Paul Vitz's Sigmund Freud's Christian Unconscious (1988), describing them all as "great books treating of or inspired by Freud."

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, discussing Rieff's work in The New Republic, described Freud: The Mind of the Moralist a "brilliant book" that "bore down on the tensions between ethics and psychoanalysis", and also called it an "intellectual biography of uncommon suppleness, and a genuine literary achievement". She considered Rieff's expression "psychological man" a memorable term for a new human type who is forever "anxious and insecure" and has "an obsession with self that is unprecedented in human history." The book critic George Scialabba, discussing Rieff's work in Boston Review, called Freud: The Mind of the Moralist a "penetrating and imaginative study". He described the book as a "vigorous dissent" from the standard interpretation of Freud as a proponent of liberation from morality. He maintained that its "melodramatic" style foreshadowed Rieff's "later, full-blown apocalyptic abstractions", and suggested that the historian Christopher Lasch provided a better discussion of contemporary narcissism than did Rieff.