Overview

"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 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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9780465056767

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Brilliantly lucid; reading him on top form is like having bubbles of insight exploding inside one's head.

"""Adam Phillips is a clever, cultured, and eloquent man, a psychoanalyst and one-time child psychotherapist turned public guru, who obviously enjoys the process of writing and does it well... In this collection of essays and reviews he gives further proof of these talents, displaying his flirtatious intellect."" ""Brilliantly lucid; reading him on top form is like having bubbles of insight exploding inside one's head."""

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"Adam Phillips has been called ""the closest thing we have to a philosopher of happiness."" Formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London, Phillips is the author of such works as Winnicott; On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored; Monogamy; On Flirtation; Terror and Experts; Darwin's Worms; Promises, Promises; and Houdini's Box."

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