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Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories
Author(s): Adam Phillips (Author)
- Publisher: Basic Books
- Publication Date: 17 Feb. 2000
- Edition: New edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 160 pages
- ISBN-10: 046505675X
- ISBN-13: 9780465056750
Book Description
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 endingssuffering, 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.
