"Rage to order": Wallace Stevens and Hans Loewald

In an essay published in 1988, "Psychoanalysis in Search of Nature: Thoughts on Metapsychology, Metaphysics, Projection," Hans Loewald animates both psychoanalysis and nature in their dynamic relation, one to the other. He recapitulates many of his earlier ideas about how the mind of the child "comes into being" in the resonating, transindividual field of the mother-infant dyad and applies them to how the individual person and nature form their transindividual field. The present paper uses Loewald's earlier ideas (1951 & 1960) and their elaboration in his late (1988) work to illuminate Wallace Stevens' poem "The Idea of Order at Key West."