Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death StoriesBasic Books, 16. juuni 2009 - 336 pages Adam Phillips has been called "the psychotherapist of the floating world" and "the closest thing we have to a philosopher of happiness." His style is epigrammatic; his intelligence, electric. His new book, Darwin's Worms, uses the biographical details of Darwin's and Freud's lives to examine endings-suffering, mortality, extinction, and death. Both Freud and Darwin were interested in how destruction conserves life. They took their inspiration from fossils or from half-remembered dreams. Each told a story that has altered our perception of our lives. For Darwin, Phillips explains, "the story to tell was how species can drift towards extinction; for Freud, the story was how the individual tended to, and tended towards his own death." In each case, it is a death story that uniquely illuminates the life story. |
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adaptation animals Anna Freud Arnold Zweig become believe better biographer's biographical truth biography Charles Darwin child course creatures culture Darwin and Freud Darwin writes death instinct deity describe digestion dying earth earthworms evidence extinction fact fiction Freud calls Freud intimates Freud says Freud wanted Freud writes going habits Hamlet happiness Hugh Haughton human nature ideals inevitable inspired interest invented Jean Laplanche Jones Jones's kind knowledge living substance London merely moral mother's absence mourning object of desire once one's own fashion Origin of Species ourselves paper paradoxical past people's perhaps person pleasure point of view political possible Prince Hamlet psychoanalysis question reality Ruth Anna Putnam satisfaction sceptical Schur scientific secular sense Sigmund Freud simply someone story struggle sublime suffering suggests talking tell things thought tion transience unconscious desire University Press Vegetable Mould Wallace Stevens whole notion wish words worms wrote