Love & Passion Quote by Wallace Stevens

Stevens needles Freud by swapping the era's favorite master key. If psychoanalysis could make sex explain everything, he suggests, an equally sharp mind could just as easily make egotism do the same job. The line is funny because it treats grand theory like a parlor trick: pick a dominant human impulse, then retrofit the world until it conforms. It is also an attack on intellectual fashion, the kind that turns a useful insight into an all-purpose solvent.

The intent is less anti-sex than anti-reductionism. Stevens is watching early-20th-century culture get newly fluent in Freud and newly addicted to explanation. He’s suspicious of any system that turns messy experience into a single storyline, especially one that flatters the explainer with the authority of inevitability. His jab lands because it exposes the rhetorically seductive move beneath the science: once you name a hidden driver, everything becomes evidence.

Subtext: egotism is already doing more work than we admit. Freud’s emphasis on libido scandalized polite society, but Stevens implies the deeper scandal is vanity - the stubborn human need to be the center of the narrative, even when narrating our own supposed unmasking. People would "forget a good deal about sex" because the obsession is partly displaced self-regard: sex as drama, sex as identity, sex as the story that makes us interesting.

Context matters. Stevens, a modernist poet and insurance executive, lived among systems - legal, financial, philosophical - and made art out of resisting their totalizing pull. The quip reads like a modernist manifesto in miniature: reality won’t be saved by one concept, and any theory that claims otherwise may be confessing its own egotism.