Yin-Yang

Darwin and Freud struggled to make sense of the past. They saw things in the past that many before them had overlooked, and they labored to bring that extraordinary plethora of phenomena into some coherent form. For Darwin, that form was the theory of evolution; for Freud, it was psychoanalysis. What did each see when looking back on how we came to be who we are? And how did each determine what really mattered?

These are the questions with which psychoanalyst Adam Phillips begins his slim, inviting and altogether thoughtful book. Phillips, whose practice concentrated on children, is a gifted and inventive writer. His books on psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott and on such topics as curiosity, flirtation, monogamy and boredom have established him as one of the most original inheritors of Freud’s legacy. “Darwin’s Worms” is the latest example of Phillips’ wonderful ability to tackle weighty subjects in elegant, brief essays, linking evolution and psychoanalysis through the themes of loss and death.

Both Darwin and Freud saw change everywhere, and each wondered how we cope with this natural fact. Deep in our tradition rests the idea that stability, permanence and eternity have priority over that which is ephemeral. Darwin and Freud, on the other hand, learned that coping with change is a way of staying alive, staying sane--and a way of leaving an inheritance to those who come after us. Phillips sees both men as thinkers who embraced the necessity of change and who wanted to “convert us to the beauty of the ephemeral.” The theories of evolution and psychoanalysis teach us the arts of transience and how to live without any eternal order that would frame nature or history: no God, no end of history and no telos of nature.

Loss and death were the central problems for these thinkers for whom history was shot through with natural forces without any divine plan. We are moved by nature and we must respond to what it throws at us; but the movement has no direction, and so change can feel like loss. Phillips finds both Darwin and Freud haunted by bereavement. “Inability (unwillingness) to mourn leads to fear of loving, which amounts for Freud to an inability to live.” This is the specific theme of Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” but Phillips sees it as a red thread running throughout his work. In the Darwinian world, death is not an occasion for judgment, nor is it a transition to another state of being; it is simply the condition under which we all live.

Darwin’s work is informed by the anxiety that everything disappears. And there are agents of disappearance, species of destruction that remain behind as witnesses to what they have digested, what they have overcome in order to survive (for a while). It is, Phillips writes, as if nature were torn between conservation and effacement. Nothing is immutable, but there are traces of what has gone before that bear witness to change. We are to make sense of these traces without justifying or redeeming them in relation to some higher purpose. The moralistic cant that passes for scientific, “evolutionary” approaches to ethics today--whether in regard to monogamy, rape or altruism--has no place in Darwin’s world. Discerning the traces of change, of loss and death will bring us closer to the rhythms of the only place we have to be: the world of nature in which we live and die.

This is where the “worms” of Phillips’ title become relevant. In Darwin’s 1837 paper on the formation of vegetable molds, he sets out to explain the natural burial of matter lying on the surface of the Earth. He concludes that “worms in their excavations swallow earthly matter, and--having separated the portion which serves for their nutriment, they reject at the mouth of their burrows the remainder.” This process is literally how the Earth is continually remade--through fecund burial.

Near the end of his life, Darwin returned to the subject of worms and their capacity to remake the Earth. “Perhaps it is not so strange,” Phillips comments, “that as Darwin gets so close to his own death he starts writing about worms.” But these are not the worms of death and disintegration; they are creatures who “preserve the past and create the conditions for future growth.” Not that they mean to, nor that they are working out some greater plan. The scientist sees instead that the worms inadvertently make the world “contingently hospitable.” If we search for some higher purpose, we would never see the real work going on under our feet. By learning to notice this work of nature, to pay attention to how destruction creates life, we may come to feel more at home in this world. In this way too, Darwin’s own contribution to destroying one world, call it a theological one, can be seen as turning over the ground for future growth.

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Creative destruction forms Phillips’ bridge from Darwin to Freud. In 1885, Freud decided to burn his papers and notes. He lamented that they were unworthy of continued existence but also noted with some pleasure that by destroying them he was confounding his future biographers. This combination of pessimism and arrogance is familiar to readers of Freud. Phillips focuses on the psychoanalyst’s desire to be both riddle and sphinx, “the one who asks, but never answers the question.” One might imagine that the founder of psychoanalysis would confidently cultivate both self-knowledge and the capacity to comprehend others. But self-creation to him meant destroying--or at least burying--parts of ourselves, making them all but inaccessible. Thus, Freud’s own wish not to be known is less at odds with his practice and theory than it might first appear.

Psychoanalysis does not really promise self-knowledge; the divisions of the self, it claims, run through to the core of our being. Veils of self-ignorance are never fully lifted, and no one else can be transparent to us. But this is not, for Freud, an occasion for skepticism or despair. As Phillips puts it, “It’s not that we misunderstand each other, that we keep getting it wrong, it is that we put so much belief--false belief--in the whole notion of knowing and understanding.” Freud called that force in our lives that disrupts all attempts at knowing and understanding the “death instinct”: the force that leads us to want to bury ourselves, sometimes with the result that we reemerge in totally unexpected ways. It is the death instinct--the worm within us--that would undermine any coherent life story we try to frame for ourselves and for others. To acknowledge this force against coherence and understanding is to recognize our capacities for change.

Phillips believes that coherence is dangerous because seeking it may prevent us from seeing the extraordinary contingency--the sheer weirdness--of our lives and the world. He is on firm ground here, but I think he may overstate what he calls Freud’s skepticism about our ability to know ourselves and others. Freud didn’t think that skepticism defeated the search for knowledge, only that skepticism could never itself be vanquished. This is a point the philosopher Stanley Cavell has made for decades in writing on Hollywood movies, Emerson, Thoreau and Freud. Surely Phillips is right to note that for Freud the “concept of truth was a cover story for rather diverse forms of satisfaction.” But in this case the cover story isn’t simply a lie. It may be more like a dream.

For Phillips, understanding the themes of loss and death is key to cultivating the “arts of transience.” In this perspective, loss is an occasion for invention, while an acceptance of death means that we recognize that we already are where we must be. Nature “was not a place we could leave, but only, perhaps, a place we could find out more about.” Darwin and Freud thought their writings might help us feel more at home where in any case we were bound to be. Accepting that we are in nature is possible only when we let go of perfectionism--the desire for impossible ideals that only humiliate us and distract us from the real work of the world.

For Darwin, survival in a shifting environment demands the capacity for change rather than the ability to evaluate which changes we prefer. For Freud, our facility for happiness is directly related to our capacity for letting go of our attachments to the past in order to have a history with which we can live. Phillips writes not merely to praise these thinkers but to creatively bury them, so that their themes of loss and death reemerge with clarity and relevance. In this small gem of a book, he asks us “not to be unduly dismayed by our mortality,” so that we might be converted to the beauty of the ephemeral and truly inherit the Earth.