From Sontag: Her Life and Work, which will be published by Ecco this month.

“In the Freudian conception,” wrote one author, “as it gradually emerged through these early years of uncertainty, the body exists as a symptom of mental demands.”

The identity of that author is one of the enduring mysteries in the life of Susan Sontag. The book that contains it, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, was published in 1959 under the name of Philip Rieff. But ever after, the wife from whom he was by that point separated would claim to be its real author.…