Darwin's Worms>

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.>