Darwin's Worms

Darwin's Worms sets Charles Darwin's late study of earthworms beside Sigmund Freud's writing on mourning and the death drive, reading two bodies of work as attempts to tell a story about endings. Phillips treats Darwin and Freud as naturalists of loss, thinkers who replace consolation and cure with an unsentimental account of how organisms and psyches wear away over time.

Reading the two together, Phillips argues that transience is not a problem to be solved but the condition that gives a life its shape and value. Darwin's worms, patiently turning the soil that buries everything, become his figure for a nature indifferent to progress and redemption; Freud's grief and repetition become ways of living with what cannot be recovered. Mortality, in this account, is what makes attachment matter rather than what ruins it.

For the practitioner it offers a way to sit with a patient's losses without promising restoration, and a vocabulary for holding decline, ageing and the wish to die alongside the ordinary work of care.