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Darwin's Worms : On Life Stories and Death Stories
Darwin's Worms On Life Stories and Death Stories Author:Adam Phillips A startlingly original psychoanalytic writer takes on death, loss, and the telling of life stories through an exploration of Darwin and Freud 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 boo... more »k, 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.« less
A New York Times Notable Book: ``Phillips reveals how Darwin and Freud make death and mortality integral to our sens of ourselves and, in doing so, teach us about the art of transience.''