by Adam Phillips
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by Adam Phillips
|
by Adam Phillips
|
by Adam Phillips
|
by Adam Phillips
|
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Amazon.co.uk Review
His gift for finding the "words to say it" has become one of the hallmarks of Adam Phillips's writing. Described as a "philosopher of happiness" and a therapist who "writes as well as he doctors" Phillips has done much to bring psychoanalysis into contact with the broad spectrum of cultural life (the "larger world of words", of literature and story, as he puts it at the beginning of On Flirtation in 1994). Following his exploration of the child as a figure of life and passion in The Beast in the Nursery (1998), in Darwin's Worms Phillips travels to the opposite end of the line: suffering, loss, mortality are the key themes in this reading of Darwin's lifelong passion for the earthworm and Freud's equally longstanding distaste for the idea of biography (the pretence at a coherent and narratable life). Weaving a complex and persuasive tale around his two apparently disparate subjects, Phillips finds Darwin and Freud united in their sceptically secular attitude towards the "higher things" of this world. He suggests that both men "recycle what their cultures try to disown": the creative achievement of the lowly worm, the grief which both keeps people going and drives them to death. That paradox in turn drives this book: its sometimes unexpected interpretation of the constraints and transience of human life as a pull towards the future--and a different way of thinking about death. --Vicky Lebeau
Review
There is a great deal of comfort to be gleaned from this slim yet fascinating book if the reader believes, like the author, that our modern world is riven with an acute sense of endings - of mortality, extinction and loss. He argues that our lives are rooted in versions of Darwin and Freud, who between them revolutionized the course of mankind; that they bequeathed to us a view of ourselves as animals, full of suffering, struggling competitively for survival. Drawing on the examples of Darwin's fixation with earthworms and Freud's antipathy to biographers, Phillips insists that both writers were interested above all in how destruction and change conserves life. Described as a 'philosopher of happiness', the athor translates the pessimism usually associated with a recognition of transcience or instability into an entirely new kind of positivism. (Kirkus UK)
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His gift for finding the "words to say it" has become one of the hallmarks of Adam Phillips's writing. Described as a "philosopher of happiness" and a therapist who "writes as well as he doctors" Phillips has done much to bring psychoanalysis into contact with the broad spectrum of cultural life (the "larger world of words", of literature and story, as he puts it at the beginning of On Flirtation in 1994). Following his exploration of the child as a figure of life and passion in The Beast in the Nursery (1998), in Darwin's Worms Phillips travels to the opposite end of the line: suffering, loss, mortality are the key themes in this reading of Darwin's lifelong passion for the earthworm and Freud's equally longstanding distaste for the idea of biography (the pretence at a coherent and narratable life). Weaving a complex and persuasive tale around his two apparently disparate subjects, Phillips finds Darwin and Freud united in their sceptically secular attitude towards the "higher things" of this world. He suggests that both men "recycle what their cultures try to disown": the creative achievement of the lowly worm, the grief which both keeps people going and drives them to death. That paradox in turn drives this book: its sometimes unexpected interpretation of the constraints and transience of human life as a pull towards the future--and a different way of thinking about death. --Vicky Lebeau
Review
There is a great deal of comfort to be gleaned from this slim yet fascinating book if the reader believes, like the author, that our modern world is riven with an acute sense of endings - of mortality, extinction and loss. He argues that our lives are rooted in versions of Darwin and Freud, who between them revolutionized the course of mankind; that they bequeathed to us a view of ourselves as animals, full of suffering, struggling competitively for survival. Drawing on the examples of Darwin's fixation with earthworms and Freud's antipathy to biographers, Phillips insists that both writers were interested above all in how destruction and change conserves life. Described as a 'philosopher of happiness', the athor translates the pessimism usually associated with a recognition of transcience or instability into an entirely new kind of positivism. (Kirkus UK)
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