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Another delightful book from the gifted pen of the noted essayist and psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips. A gourmet offering, wise, witty, poetic, informative, and educational. His writing is an art. He weaves a tapestry of his own
design with themes of life and death, suffering, struggle, nature's ingenuity, opportunities, and abundance, as told by Darwin and Freud, a tapestry of beauty and wisdom. My summary can highlight content, but not the exquisiteness of presentation.
In one of Phillips's previous books, Terrors and Experts (1996), he challenged the profession of psychoanalysis in much the same spirit as Jonathan Lear did in his book, Open Minded. Lear juxtaposes the dogmatism of the profession to the many-sidedness of Freud. Phillips distinguishes two Freuds: The Freud of the Enlightenment and reason, who betrayed the Freud who discovered our nature-given undercurrent of non-reason, the unruly imp that trips us up and cannot be controlled or be known. Terrors and Experts wishes to shift our pride in our expertise of the psyche to a pride in our expertise on the limits of our knowing who we are. Darwin's Worms extends the theme of the limits of knowing by telling of Darwin's emphasis on change, mutation, loss, extinction, on new forms and varieties. The book has four parts: a prologue, a chapter called “Darwin's Worms,” a chapter on “The Death of Freud,” and an epilogue. The dramatic vignettes taken from Darwin's and Freud's writings are placed in their historical context, the 19th century struggle with the prominent traditional theological presence of a God who was in a position to judge, who held the key to the kingdom of morality. Darwin and Freud took God out of the equation; God versus nature with man as the middleman. Now man confronted nature, but nature neither judged nor told us what to do. Nature was on its own side and gave no advice. Nature had laws, but no intentions or responsibilities. Where could man look for his moral underpinnings? Neither Darwi