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by Adam Phillips
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by Adam Phillips
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by Adam Phillips
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by Adam Phillips
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by Adam Phillips
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Product Description
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
Product Description
Darwin and Freud, it seems, took God out of the big picture and left us in a world determined by nature and overshadowed by mortality. In this text the author considers how these giants of science felt about death, and develops a new understanding of ageing, loss - and the art of transience.
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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?
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71% buy the item featured on this page: Darwin's Worms £7.19 |
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8% buy The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms with Observations on Their Habits (Illustrated Edition) (Dodo Press)£8.99 |
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7% buy Monogamy £5.68 |
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7% buy Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis £6.99 |
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