Philip Rieff (December 15, 1922– July 1, 2006) published three major works during his lifetime, and several others at the very end of his life and posthumously. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) was critically acclaimed and helped shape much of the subsequent debate about Freud's cultural impact for more than a decade. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (1966) represented Rieff's broad account of cultural change in the age of therapeutic culture, and its prescience has been widely acknowledged. Finally, Fellow Teachers (1973) received much less critical attention, and it is regarded as Rieff's retreat from public writing, though it was first delivered to an academic audience of faculty and students, the only public that truly mattered to him. After that, Rieff labored for 30 years on his magnum opus, Sacred Order/ Social Order, three volumes of which appeared shortly before and after his death. Charisma, a manuscript composed largely after the publication of The Triumph of the Therapeutic, was also published after Rieff's death.

Very little secondary commentary exists on Rieff's theories as compared to other social and cultural theorists of similar stature and importance. One book- length study exists written by a Dutch scholar Antonius A. W. Zondervan (Sociology and the Sacred: An Introduction to Philip Rieff's Theory of Culture¸ 2005), and another by Cain Elliot (Fire Backstage: Philip Rieff and the Monastery of Culture, 2013). Recent scholarship on Sigmund Freud refers to Rieff as “the venerable conservative sociologist and critic (and Freud expert)” and as “the eminent sociologist.” This volume of essays addresses Rieff's work, a decade after his death, and it seeks to redress the scarcity of writings on Rieff's vision in particular as a sociological and cultural theorist, but also as a teacher.

This brief introduction is intended to argue that Rieff was not characteristically ambitious in the sense of seeking wider and more lucrative audiences. In fact, in his reckoning of the ancient therapeutai — Rieff's conceptual doppelgänger who exemplifies all that his modern “therapeutic” does not— therapy was the theoretical trapdoor available to the worried well who managed modern life with relentless ambition rather than realistic hope and with aching envy and disappointment rather than modest and inevitable despair.