Darwin's Worms
Adam Phillips
Faber & Faber, 148pp, £7.99

Adam Phillips is fond of what you might call the audacious syllogism. "Even in [Darwin's] very early writings the painstaking, lucid prose of empirical observation breaks into a covert moral and therefore literary dilemma." Note how much assumption lies behind that "therefore". Or: "From a political point of view - one that takes economics, and therefore exploitation, seriously - ...".

To notice these unusually significant stylistic trills is not to quibble with them, for they do actually withstand scrutiny, but to see how easily they could have been overlooked, had you not been paying attention. Acknowledging them is like psychoanalysis itself: latching on to the import that can be transmitted in nearly an instant, or the way that the biggest questions can be begged in what sounds almost like an afterthought.

Here, of course, it is deliberate, not like the inadvertently revealing detail offered up from the analysand's couch, and we shouldn't make too much of it, but it is interesting that Sigmund Freud was fond of the same trick. In Civilization and its Discontents, he writes how sexual love "has given us our most intense experience of an overwhelming sensation of pleasure and has thus furnished us with a pattern for our search for happiness." How much weight that half-impatient "thus" bears - the weight, virtually, of his entire philosophy. Earlier in the same essay, mightily puzzled at the human capacity for religious belief, he writes: "One is justified in attempting to discover a psycho-analytic - that is, a genetic - explanation of such a feeling."

Now, I do not have the original German text to hand, but I am fairly sure that you do not pluck a word like "genetic" out of thin air, or as a vague but euphonious near-synonym. That was how deeply Freud thought our inner selves were placed: beyond our control, but not our observation; analysis was for him as useful a tool as those which unravel our chromosomes today. It also shows that Freud always had Darwin in mind, however obliquely.

So here we have a book that links Freud and Darwin. Can you imagine anything more intellectually modish, more tiresomely inevitable ? Darwinian theory has, after all, pitched its tent firmly in Freudian territory, and evolutionary psychology - which argues that our minds, their emotions and neuroses are as subject to natural selection as anything else - makes its seductive calls to those who wonder why we are the way we are.

Which leaves Freud in an increasingly perilous position. Every month, it seems, another book kicking him or his epigones comes out; and these books are not being written by fools. Many are by disenchanted analysts. They talk about the way Freud falsified his data, or made spurious analogies. A Freudian could look on these works with a kind of indulgence: they represent the final, Oedipal renunciation of the man who, for all psychiatrists, is Jehovah and the Father rolled into one.

Phillips will not let Freud go like that, even if, towards the end of this book, he talks about the "fiction" of the death instinct, or "the supreme fiction" of the unconscious. But, if you look at the context, they are fictions, says Phillips, that help us explain a life better than, say, a biography. Freud was the story-teller who furnished us with new myths; myths which were needed after the fact - my apologies to religious readers - of the death of God.

And no-one did for God more comprehensively than Darwin. This is what links him and Freud in Darwin's Worms: the way that they both cope with death, the utter death that awaits us.

Bracketed by a prologue and an epilogue, Darwin's Worms contains two medium-sized yet rich essays, first on Darwin, then on Freud. Phillips notes Darwin's fascination with worms, a creature both literally and figuratively lowly. Worm food is what we become, of course (without an afterlife it is all we become), and as Phillips wryly notices, "perhaps it is not strange that as Darwin gets so close to his own death he starts writing about worms." (He does not, though, allude to the alternative meaning of "worm" - that is, the biblical serpent.)

Darwin saluted the importance of worms, their action in the soil: without them, things would simply not grow. "Darwin has replaced a creation myth with a secular maintenance myth," says Phillips. "One way or another the lowly, Darwin insists... are underestimated; whether it be ordinary mortals as compared with a supreme deity, or those at the bottom of the social hierarchy."

His essay on Freud - less satisfactory than that on Darwin - begins with a surprising letter that Freud wrote to his fiancée when he was 29, in which he announces that he is destroying all his old papers in order to make his future biographers' work more difficult. Two things should strike us: that Freud was not yet anything like the Freud we have come to know - he had no reputation as a Freudian, so to speak; and, secondly, that the man who placed such importance on the life-stories of those who came to see him should resist anyone prying into his own life.

Phillips then takes us to the end of Freud's life, when he wrote, shortly before the injection of morphine that he asked to be polished off with: "I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else... In the words of King Macbeth, Let us die in harness." (I recalled Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents again: "the narcissistic man, who inclines to be self-sufficient, will seek his main satisfactions in his internal mental processes;" Freud can, in a fashion, be a subject of analysis, unlike the barber who, defined as the man who shaves everyone who does not shave himself, cannot shave himself.)

Freud's concern was Montaigne's: that philosophy is a knowing how to die, and one of the virtues of Phillips's work is that it encourages us to read Freud as a philosopher, and not as an über-shrink. (For my part, I'm beginning to think that all books should be called "Civilization and its Discontents".)

A precis of Phillips's book would be difficult. It would approximate in length to the original, and it wouldn't be as much fun to read. Darwin's Worms is a slim volume, and so might be mistaken for a slight one; but it isn't. It might even be the best book he has written yet. What Phillips is doing is monumental: he is helping us, via the agency of Freud, to learn to cope with death and loss, both of ourselves and of our consoling myths.