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Many of Adam Phillips's critically acclaimed books are collections of essays originally written for literary journals or given as talks to academic audiences. Often he writes directly about psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts, but all of his writings involve psychoanalytic ideas and perspectives. His language and style reflect the cutting-edge sensibilities of contemporary cultural and intellectual life. His writing is engaging and conversational, but also highly creative and literate. Often he begins with observations on commonplace subjects, then quickly takes his well-educated readers directly to profound human issues and questions.
In Darwin's Worms, Phillips presents two such essays—one on Darwin (“Darwin Turns the Worm”) and another on Freud (“The Death of Freud”). Although we are never explicitly told so, I suspect that these two essays were originally intended as stand-alone works. By adding a prologue and an epilogue, both substantial, the author expands two brief works into a short book, an extended meditation on the attitudes toward life, working habits, great discoveries, and transcendent values that Phillips believes create a kinship between these two great thinkers, whose ideas so profoundly influenced Western thought in the last century.
As a book, Darwin's Worms works best in the prologue and epilogue, where the author synthesizes Darwin's and Freud's ideas and their implications. Phillips points out that Darwin and Freud are each known for making a rigorous, compelling case that human beings are part of nature. Both men undermined humanity's illusions regarding its privileged place in the universe or its special relationship with a divine being. Darwin's religious faith and Freud's avowed atheism may seem at odds. Nevertheless, each played a crucial role in the rise of secular humanism and a contemporary worldview that no longer requires that we take God into consideration when examining our assumptions about human nature and the ultimate meaning of hum