Let us begin on the familiar terrain of English literary history and observe the evolution of twentieth-century scholarly interest in Elizabethan theories of personality and psychology as keys to understanding character and motivation in Elizabethan literature. Two influential studies, an article by Edward Dowden in Atlantic Monthly (1907) and a book by P. Ansell Robin (1911), introduced modern readers to a number of sixteenth-century treatises on the subject of human personality which were widely read in Shakespeare's England. These include Continental works in translation—among them Juan Huarte de San Juan's Examination of Men's Wits, from Spain—and such English studies as Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Mind, Timothy Bright's On Melancholy, and the one best known today, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.

The suggestion that Elizabethan dramatists were familiar with these treatises and based their conception of literary character upon what was known, or believed to be known, about real character led to a series of studies, the most notable of which is Lilly Bess Campbell's classic Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (1930). Since then, and especially with the rise of what we might call postformalist contextual criticism, it has come to be natural and normal to consider contemporary theories of character as part of the cultural-social-intellectual and economic context in which a literary work is conceived by its author and apprehended by its public. Francis Johnson observes that “in a loose, wholly unclinical fashion every Elizabethan dramatist invoked the contemporary science and terminology of psychology in depicting characters on the stage,” and that “the audience of 1600 had a general knowledge of the psychological framework inherited from Antiquity, just as we in 1950 have a vague acquaintance with the general doctrines of modern psychiatry and psychoanalysis which we bring with us to a performance of Mourning Becomes Electra or The Cocktail Party.”¹

All this is eminently reasonable, and analogous observations have been made with respect to Spanish literary history. Franz Alexander and Sheldon Selesnick, for example, remark that Cervantes's grasp of the psychology of mental illness as revealed in Don Quixote is even more striking than Shakespeare's. Besides the psychotic fantasies, Cervantes also demonstrates and exploits in artistic terms the principle that the mentality of the psychotic includes the essential qualities of normal thinking.² That is, Cervantes is concerned simultaneously with normal mental processes and with mental disorders. His interest is rooted in an extraordinarily rich and fertile subsoil, as his countrymen for some two hundred years prior to Don Quixote had been dealing both theoretically and practically with the phenomenon of personality and with the insane and their care. This tradition has won for Spain the sobriquet “cradle of psychiatry.”³

It is customary to consider Ospitalis Ignoscencium, established at Valencia in 1409, as the first European facility devoted entirely to the care of mental patients. Recently, however, it has been argued that the Hospital of Santa Cruz in Barcelona (1401) was the first facility in which the mentally ill were actually cared for and therapy practiced by trained personnel, and that the Valencia operation, while established specifically for vagrant and antisocial mental deviates, was in fact a kind of glorified soup kitchen, where care was limited to confinement and physical nourishment.⁴ Whatever the relative merits of patient care at these two facilities may have been, the fact remains that in the first years of the fifteenth century Spain, and specifically the Crown of Aragón, took the lead in Europe in the establishment of centers for the mentally ill. The mental hospital in Zaragoza was founded in 1425, that of Palma de Mallocra in 1456. Within the domain of the Crown of Castile, the oldest facility was the “Hospital de Inocentes” established at Sevilla in 1436. This is probably the madhouse Cervantes refers to in the barber's story of the patient who believed he was Neptune (Don Quixote II, 1).⁵ (The Sevilla institution was followed by those at Toledo [the “Casa del Nuncio” in 1483] and Valladolid [in 1489].) By the beginning of the sixteenth century, a full hundred years before Don Quixote, Spain possessed a widespread network of facilities devoted to the care of the insane, and it is reasonable to suppose that Cervantes was personally acquainted with at least one institution.

More to the point for our purposes, the practical care of mental patients during the sixteenth century was accompanied by a series of more or less theoretical treatises on human personality and on the causes and suggested cures for personality disorders. Cervantes, as we know, was an avid reader. His father was himself a surgeon and may have possessed a library that included some of these works. There is every reason to suppose, before we take up his fiction at all, that Cervantes had access to and was familiar with this body of material. When we consider that his own work is peppered with mentally disturbed characters, of whom Don Quixote is merely the most fully developed and best known, it becomes both arrogant and foolish to assume that Cervantes was not abreast of current thinking in the field. With this in mind, it might be profitable to pass some of these treatises in review and offer some comments on their possible relation to or influence upon Cervantes in general and Don Quixote in particular.

One of the more original and prescient of these, the Nueva filosofía de la naturaleza del hombre [New philosophy of the nature of man] (1587), attributed to Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera, is actually the work of her father, the Bachiller Miguel Sabuco. He considers the human neurological system to have the form of an inverted tree, with the roots in the brain, the trunk in the spinal column, and the foliage in the other members, especially the stomach. Man possesses two “harmonies,” whose relationship controls his health. The first resides in the brain and the second in the stomach. When the cerebral harmony is altered in some way, cerebral moisture is lost and illness results. This alteration may arise from two causes: internal factors, which Sabuco calls the affects, and external causes such as plague, the evil eye, poison, changes in habitat, diet, and the like. Sabuco considers the affects more important than all other causes in the psychogenesis of disease. “The harm caused to the secondary harmony of the stomach,” he writes, “is nothing compared to that caused by anger, grief and other affects in the primary harmony of the brain.” The therapeutic technique he proposes consists first in reestablishing the overall harmony between body and soul, stomach and brain, and to this end he advises “words and acts which in adults engender happiness and hope. Then the harmony of the stomach should be seen to, with comforting foods and medications to soothe it.”⁶

One has the impression, upon reading Sabuco, of a disquieting modernity. He understands that emotional states—grief, anger, frustration, even an excess of joy—can have disastrous physical effects, to the point of causing death. His therapeutic formula consists of four sequential phases. First, learn to recognize when you are becoming angry or distraught (or when your friend is becoming so). Second, talk yourself out of it (or, help your friend by talking him out of it). Sabuco insists again and again on the efficacy of the spoken word as medicine for these emotional disorders. Third, support the spoken word with pleasant and harmonious surroundings—music, country rest with the movement of trees and the splashing of fountains. Fourth, calm the stomach with bland foods and suitable medication. In modern terminology we might describe his approach as holistic, the insistence on the interdependence of psyche and soma, emphasizing positive thinking and supportive psychotherapy in combination with surroundings, diet, and medication conducive to the reduction of tension. This is in fact the normal routine in most mental hospitals today.

Another treatise, also disturbing in its ready assimilation to at least one aspect of the most current thinking, is that of Jerónimo de Mondragón, Censura de la locura humana, y excelencias della [Censure and excellencies of madness] (1598).⁷ A translation of this work's extensive subtitle will suffice to indicate its orientation: “In whose first part is demonstrated that those who are considered by the world to be sane are mad, and therefore deserve no praise. In the second part it is demonstrated how those commonly held to be mad are worthy of great praise. With a great variety of pleasant and curious histories, and other things no less useful than delightful.” Mondragón's tongue-in-cheek praise of folly recalls, besides Erasmus, the relationship between the presumably sane Duke and Duchess and the certifiably mad Don Quixote as delineated by their resident chaplain (II, 32). The equation of madness and sanity with public opinion anticipates an important aspect of the thought of R. D. Laing, for whom madness is defined as whatever society decrees it to be, sanity being the reverse. This brings us back to the events of I, 45, where a barber's basin is transformed into Mambrino's helmet by the imposition of the will of the majority of those present.

The works of Sabuco and Mondragón, suggestive though they be, are not really representative of the mainstream of sixteenth-century medical thought. Sixteenth-century medicine is still basically medieval humoral medicine, with Galen and Avicenna the principal authorities, and mental disorders are overwhelmingly considered to be caused by some humoral imbalance or alteration. Before proceeding, we might pause to review the principal tenets of humoral theory as it was current in the late sixteenth century. Briefly, the human body is composed of four humors: yellow bile, blood, black bile, and phlegm. Each person's physical characteristics and personality are controlled by the particular mixture of the four humors within him. The predominance of one over the others results in personality types whose names and characteristics are still familiar to us: the choleric, the sanguine, the melancholic, and the phlegmatic. Now, a complex system of correspondences had been established between the four bodily humors, the four elements of the earth, and the characteristics of the latter (hot, cold, dry, moist). These, in turn, are all related to the body organs that secrete the four humors. Thus, for example, Don Quixote's choleric temperament is determined by his liver, which produces yellow bile (choler) associated with the element air, whose primary characteristic is its dryness. Indeed, dryness is an essential part of our hero's psychophysical constitution, as we shall see.⁸

An important treatise that Cervantes might well have known is that of Andrés Velázquez, Libro de la melancolía (1585). The term melancholy appears here in its generally accepted sixteenth-century sense: a disturbance or alienation of the faculties of understanding or reason, without fever. Velázquez distinguishes two varieties of melancholy, which are in fact differences of degree and not of kind: melancholy proper, and mania. Within the category of melancholy proper, fear and sadness are by no means the only possible manifestations. In fact the symptoms are extremely variable. “One patient may believe he is a rooster, flap his arms as though they were wings, and attempt to crow. Another may think he is a brick, and refuse water because he is afraid of melting.”⁹

A particularly interesting humoral treatise, especially pertinent for the study of Cervantes, is that of Alfonso Ponce de Santa Cruz, Diagnotio et cura affectum melancholicorum (1622). It is interesting as an example of humoral theory in general, and for one astounding case history in particular. Dr. Ponce was the personal physician of Philip II and was thus a contemporary of Cervantes; his son Antonio published the treatise on melancholy post-humously. The author affirms that the “melancholy humor” is the product of black bile, which attacks the brain in its several faculties. When this humor affects the memory, for example, it produces fear, forgetfulness, and sadness. He also offers some case histories, among which the following merits special comment. A patient believed he had been transformed into a glass vase and consequently avoided contact with people for fear of being broken. He was covered with straw and locked inside a room. A fire was set, whereupon the patient began to bang on the door and scream to be let out. Upon his release from the burning room, he was asked how it was that he had not broken himself while pounding on the door, to which he replied that he was no longer made of glass but was simply an unfortunate man.¹⁰ The parallels with Cervantes's El Licenciado Vidriera are so striking as to suggest something beyond coincidence. Cervantes surely must have known this patient or have heard of him from Dr. Ponce or another source. The etiology and the cure, of course, are quite different. In Cervantes's story the melancholy delusion is induced by poison (as Sabuco suggests), and the cure is effected not by endangering the patient's life in a fire but by lengthy and persistent supportive psychotherapy, also following the model suggested by Sabuco.

By far the most important humoral theorist, for the modernity of his thought as well as for his obvious affinities with Cervantes, is Dr. Juan Huarte de San Juan. He wrote a treatise of great influence, both in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, entitled Examen de ingenios para las ciencias [Examination of mental faculties for the sciences]. It was published at Baeza in 1575 and reprinted five times before the Inquisition placed it on the Index in 1583. The Expurgatorio of 1584 specified forty-four passages to be eliminated. Huarte prepared the required expurgated edition but decided not to publish it, and it was not until 1594, when his son authorized publication, that his work became available in the form in which we have known it until recently. It is possible that Cervantes met Huarte's son in Baeza in 1591 through Don Diego de Benavides and Don Juan Vilalta, two old prison companions from Algiers he happened to run into there.¹¹

Huarte's original contributions are two. First, he develops the existing relationships between the four humors and the four characteristics (hot and cold, wet and dry); in fact, he is concerned more with the latter than with the former. A perfect equilibrium, he asserts, produces an individual whose principal characteristics are dullness and unsuitability for any occupation involving the use of the mental faculties. This is what he defines as the first level of ingenio: passive receptivity, limited to absorbing what is transmitted through the senses and by teachers. Huarte's next level, that of normal human intelligence, is produced by some imbalance among the humors and the characteristics. Most people fall into this group, as medieval tradition suggests. Normal human intelligence as defined by Huarte is capable of acquiring knowledge through its own resources, utilizing the data provided by sense perceptions and formal instruction, but in addition is able to develop cognitive systems, concepts, and principles on independent grounds. Furthermore, normal human intelligence is capable of generating new thoughts and of finding appropriate expression for them. Finally, Huarte posits a third level of intelligence which he calls ingenio superior and which is frequently accompanied by dementia. This level occurs only rarely and, in humoral terms, is the result of a massive, radical imbalance among humors and characteristics. It is capable, without particular study or apparent effort, to “speak such subtle and surprising things, yet true, that were never before seen, heard or writ, or even so much as thought of.”¹²

Huarte's thought here coincides in great part with the prevailing medical theory of his time, expressed in the subtitle of Andrés Velázquez's 1585 treatise on melancholy: “In which is discussed the nature of this disease called melancholy, and its causes and symptoms, and if the rustic can speak Latin or philosophize while in a frenetic or manic state, without having first studied these subjects.” What makes Huarte particularly interesting for us moderns is not so much the humoral basis of his thought, which he shares with virtually every physician of his time, but his second—and most original—contribution: his definition of the three levels of mental faculties in terms of the ability to generate new ideas and concepts. That is, for Huarte, intelligence (ingenio) is a generative faculty, and indeed he derives the Spanish ingenio from Latin ingenerare ‘to engender.’ An important corollary of this is his association of the superior ingenio with madness, thus inverting the usual value judgments brought to bear on the individual so constituted or affected. What for Andrés Velázquez exists negatively, as a curiosity—the rustic speaking Latin—is for Huarte a positive manifestation of intellectual superiority.

The relationship between Huarte's application of humoral theory—his concept of the superior intelligence (ingenio) touched with madness—and Cervantes's character (el ingenioso hidalgo) is obviously a suggestive one, and since the turn of this century a body of scholarship has grown up which seeks to define and clarify it. In 1905 Rafael Salillas published a book entitled Un gran inspirador de Cervantes: el Dr. Juan Huarte y su “Examen de ingenios” (Madrid: Victoriano Suárez), in which he relates pertinent passages in Cervantes's first work (the pastoral La Galatea of 1585), the exemplary novel El Licenciado Vidriera (1613), and the posthumous Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617), as well as the Quixote, to different aspects of Huarte's doctrine. For Salillas, ingenioso comes to be a synonym of loco (insane), and the description of Don Quixote's character is developed accordingly. Huarte's own thought was further studied by Mavricio de Iriarte, who pointed out its importance as a theory of personality in 1948 and who elaborates the relation between Huarte's ingenio and Cervantes's ingenioso hidalgo.¹³

In 1954, Vicente Peset offered a summary of Huarte's doctrine on the combination of hot and dry. Although Dr. Peset does not apply these characteristics directly to the study of Don Quixote, they are worth noting for their power both to elucidate and to confuse our analysis of the mad knight's character. In Huarte, heat is associated with imagination. Since the words spoken in delirium are a product of the individual's imagination rather than of memory or understanding, and “since frenzy, mania and melancholia are hot passions of the brain, there is a strong argument in favor of the imaginative faculty consisting in heat.” Dryness, however, is associated with understanding, as Huarte states: “Old men possess great understanding because they are dry, and for the same reason, because they lack moisture, their memories fail them.” Huarte's mapa mentis, it appears, is not without some shoals.

Passing to Huarte's third (superior) level of intelligence, Peset offers the following table of the physical and personality traits which result from the combination of hot and dry.

1. Intelligence and ability: sharpness of imagination.
2. Habits and personality: courageous, arrogant, generous, shameless, witty.
3. Voice: heavy and somewhat coarse.
4. Flesh: lean, hard, tough, made of sinews, extremely broad veins.
5. Color: dark, tanned, dark greenish, ashen.
6. Body hair: a great deal, black and thick, especially from the thighs to the navel.¹⁴

It will be observed that by no means do all these characteristics correlate with Don Quixote (no one was ever less shameless, for example) and that some of them—color, for instance—are internally inconsistent. Others, however, offer remarkable similarities with the Cervantes character.

The best-known rapprochement of Huarte and Don Quixote is that proposed by the American Hispanist Otis H. Green in a now-classic article published in 1958.¹⁵ Green applies Huarte's doctrine systematically to Don Quixote, from the etiology of his madness to his cure and death. At the beginning, the anonymous hidalgo is naturally choleric, the result of a predominance of yellow bile in combination with heat and dryness. This temperament is aggravated beyond the point of sanity by the drying out caused by lack of sleep, for instead of sleeping our man stays up reading romances of chivalry. The narrator reports, in fact, that “from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”¹⁶ At the end of each sally Don Quixote sleeps, which partially restores his humoral balance by introducing moisture, although not in sufficient amount to cure him until the end of the third sally. In fact, on the eve of that sally his friends visit him and find him particularly dried out. What allows the cure to finally occur is that beginning in II, 58 Don Quixote begins to experience attacks of melancholy, which in terms of humoral medicine is the opposite of choler, being cold and dry to choler's hot and dry. Melancholy restores judgment, at the expense of imagination. The cold of melancholy, in combination with the moisture induced by sleep, finally effects the cure. It brings Don Quixote's death as well, for melancholy has the unfortunate side effect of constricting the heart. Green's study has the merit of suggesting in the strongest possible terms the direct relation between Huarte's medical doctrine and its artistic exploitation by Cervantes, which in turn places Cervantes near the forefront of the most advanced versions of sixteenth-century personality theory based on traditional humoral medicine.

More recently, Carlos P. Otero has returned to the general relation between Huarte and Cervantes and their contemporary, the grammarian Fernando Sánchez de las Brozas (“El Brocense”), locating all of them within what we might call the “rationalist out-group” of sixteenth-century Spanish intelligentsia, whose minoritarian ideology brought them into conflict with the official policy in matters scientific and religious.¹⁷ In view of Huarte's association of superior intelligence with dementia, and considering what we know now about Cervantes and El Brocense and their society thanks to Américo Castro's masterful analyses, Otero's comments suggest an interesting hypothesis—namely, that in the repressive, conformist atmosphere of late sixteenth-century Spain, a person of superior intelligence had to be a little bit crazy merely in order to exist. …

I do not think there can be any doubt that Cervantes was acquainted with Huarte's work and that he consciously incorporated various of Huarte's ideas into the Quixote. The ingenio-ingenerare relation, for example, giving rise to the concept that one can generate oneself, with its obvious “precocious existentialist” appeal, is of course fundamental. When Cervantes remarks in his prologue to Part I that Don Quixote is “dried up, shriveled and eccentric, … and filled with various thoughts that never occurred to anyone else” (p. 11), he is obviously paraphrasing Huarte's own description of the third or superior level of intelligence: “to speak such subtle and surprising things … that were never before seen, heard or writ, or even thought of.” When Don Quixote shows his hand to Maritornes and the innkeeper's daughter in I, 43, calling attention to “the contexture of the sinews, the network of the muscles, the breadth and spaciousness of the veins” (p. 393), he seems to be paraphrasing Huarte's summary of the flesh of the hot-dry type: “hard, tough, made of sinews, extremely broad veins.” When the narrator tells us that Don Quixote lost sleep, the restorer of moisture, that his brain dried out, and that his personality altered as a result, he is already dealing with Huarte's ideas, in their more traditional form, as studied by Green. Similarly, the genesis of the exemplary novel El coloquio de los perros [The dogs' colloquy] in its author's delirium, which is induced by a similar drying-out process—he is taking the sweats as treatment for venereal disease—seems also to be based on Huarte's theory of mechanical changes in the humors and their psychic effects. When Cervantes in the prologue to Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses remarks offhandedly that the dramatist Lope de Rueda is buried in the cathedral of Córdoba, next to the famous madman Luis López, he is referring to a case history related by Huarte in the Examen de ingenios. López had lost his reason, was attacked by a sudden fever, and suddenly rose to Huarte's third or superior level of intelligence.

Although invoking Huarte allows us to understand the contemporary scientific theoretical basis for a number of concrete behavioral manifestations, Don Quixote is clearly much more than a fictionalized version of the Examen de ingenios. The most glaring discrepancy between the two lies in Cervantes's conception of character as based on acts of will, on throwing oneself into situations and entering into a dialectical relationship with one's circumstance—in short, all the features we consider “novelistic”—and Huarte's, which is based on preformed characteristics that determine aptitudes and even reactions to stimuli. Iriarte called attention to this in 1948 when he remarked that “it seems that Huarte sees only temperamentally determined reactions in an agent's actions.”¹⁸ With respect to the passage of time, Cervantes shows Don Quixote changing—and becoming more himself—because of his accumulated experience, while Huarte considers temperamental changes across time to be the result of mechanical alterations in the relationship of wet and dry and hot and cold. Thus, for example, youths have retentive memories because their brains are still nice and moist, while old men have superior intellect, but cannot remember things, because their brains have dried out over the years. Curiously enough, although Cervantes obviously rejects these mechanistic concepts at the level of consciousness, the idea of capabilities and behavior appropriate to certain ages is obviously of fundamental importance to him. Don Quixote does not act like a man of twenty-five or thirty, but like one of fifty. … For the present it is sufficient to conclude that Cervantes must have been acquainted with Huarte and that he consciously exploited parts of his doctrine. At the same time, he appears to have consciously rejected other parts.

Provocative as he is, Huarte de San Juan is not the total of sixteenth-century psychiatry. As we have seen, he is a contemporary of, and shares a common orientation with, Andrés Velázquez and Alfonso Ponce de Santa Cruz, both of whom wrote influential treatises on melancholy. It is to this subject that I must now return, and to a specific manifestation known by the name conferred upon it by the French physician Jacques Ferrand in his Traité de l'essence et guerison de l'amour, ou de la melancholie erotique (1610). I refer to the phenomenon of erotomania, the symptoms associated with the courtly love syndrome—loss of appetite, insensitivity to anything that is not the beloved, alienation, and the like. The “lover's malady,” an idea already discussed by Plato, the symptoms of which had been current in romance literature since the troubadours, was put on a scientific footing by Ferrand's treatise.

As Green remarks, melancholy is usually associated with the humor blood and with cold-dry characteristics, and it should therefore be opposed to Don Quixote's hot and dry choleric temperament. Nevertheless, Ferrand considers that hot and dry humors, as well as blood, may incline one to love, and he specifically states that choleric persons are amorous. Now in Ferrand's theory, if love remains unsatisfied, melancholy humors and attendant symptoms can develop. Love, if thwarted, cools and dries the body in various ways. It does so first through the continual mental activity it provokes. By thus busying the mind with thoughts of love, moisture is consumed, drying out results, and a humoral imbalance is produced. The hot passions which assail the lover—desire, hope, joy, anger—may also bring on melancholy by burning the humors. In addition, Ferrand mentions unevacuated seed as a possible cause of erotomania.¹⁹ As to the symptomatology, we should remember that for Cervantes and his contemporaries melancholy was not simply a form of depression, as we think of it today, but referred to any disturbance or alienation not accompanied by fever. Symptoms could either be depressive or manic, as Dr. Velázquez observed in 1585. An alternation of the two sets of symptoms was perfectly possible. Indeed, this is the case of Cardenio in I, 23 and Basilio in II, 20.

It is customary to consider Don Quixote's brush with erotomania, the willful imitation of Amadís cum Orlando suggested by his recent encounter with Cardenio, as a brilliant parodic tour de force on Cervantes's part, wherein a genuine madman deliberately becomes a counterfeit madman without abandoning his own madness.²⁰ His behavior thus offers a contrast to both Cardenio—a genuine erotomaniac—and Basilio—a trickster who feigns erotomania in order to win the girl he loves. This is true, of course, but we should remember that Don Quixote, like all knights-errant, is a man in love. Being in love, as Vivaldo points out in I, 13, is an essential constituent feature of the profession of knight-errantry. Don Quixote's love for Dulcinea comes by II, 59 to define his existence as Don Quixote. The readers of the apocryphal second part of his adventures by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda inform him that in that spurious work Don Quixote is no longer in love with Dulcinea. Our hero seizes the opportunity to demonstrate who he is by invoking his undying love. Don Quixote is nothing if not a lover. It is reasonable, then, to suppose that in spite of the contrasts between himself and Cardenio and Basilio, the combination of unrequited love and mental disorder should function in a serious, nonparodic way in Don Quixote's character. I shall investigate this important subject in chapter 3.

Until now we have been concerned with sixteenth-century theories of mental disorders to which Cervantes might have had access, his possible familiarity with them and artistic exploitation of them. We have observed that the mind and its disorders constituted an important area of theoretical investigation and clinical practice in Cervantes's society. Besides the network of mental hospitals begun in 1401, with which Cervantes was at least partially familiar, a considerable body of scholarly writing on the subject had grown up by his time. Cervantes's works certainly demonstrate his interest in the phenomenon of mental disorders. They attest as well to his general familiarity with the doctrines then current: the notions of humoral imbalance, general symptomatology (both manic and depressive) of the disorder known as melancholy, and the like. Cervantes's works also reveal precise and particular knowledge of specific texts—for example, the patient made of glass reported by Dr. Ponce de Santa Cruz, or the effects of drying out studied by Huarte. I might summarize by saying that Cervantes was certainly abreast of current theory and practice, he may actually have been ahead of it, and he was clearly not enslaved to any one particular medical authority. Cervantes had certainly read and assimilated Huarte, for example, but Huarte (or Sabuco, or Velázquez, or Ponce) did not invent Don Quixote.

Nor did all of them together. Cervantes's intuitions go far beyond contemporary medical theory, and his description of symptoms has been shown to anticipate perfectly the discoveries and classification of mental disorders made by clinical psychiatry beginning in the nineteenth century. This remarkable aspect of Cervantes's creativity has been the subject of a series of studies by practicing clinicians, the majority Spanish, beginning with Antonio Hernández Morejón, La historia clínica de Don Quijote (1848), and continuing practically to the present. The most recent such work is that of the Spanish psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Nágera, who resumes the tradition of modern clinical discussions of mental disorders in Don Quixote and other Cervantine characters.²¹

The nineteenth-century physicians—Hernández Morejón and Emilio Pi y Molist—consider Don Quixote a case of monomania, perfectly in accord with the concepts of mental illness then current. In 1905, doubtless inspired by the centenary of the publication of Don Quixote, a new, double tradition was initiated. I have already mentioned the work of Rafael Salillas, which inaugurated the Cervantes-Huarte studies. Another line of studies was begun by Ricardo Royo Villanova, a professor of medical pathology, who applied the most recent psychiatric doctrines to the symptoms exhibited by Don Quixote and concluded that his illness should be diagnosed as a “chronic paranoia or partial systematic delirium of the expansive type, the megalomaniacal form and the philanthropic variety.” This is an important point of departure, for it incorporates the description of paranoia as defined by Kraepelin, which is still current in clinical psychiatry. Most succeeding studies of Don Quixote's disease consider it from this perspective. They tend to assume a somatic basis for the disease and take special care for the accurate and precise description of symptoms as the basis for an accurate diagnosis. The doctoral thesis of Lucien Libert, La folie de Don Quichotte (1909), and the studies of Dr. J. Goyanes, Tipología del Quijote (1932) and De la biotypologie de Don Quichotte et de Sancho Panza (1934), are representative.

By all odds the most important manifestations of this tendency are those of the Peruvian psychiatrist Carlos Gutiérrez Noriega in the 1940s and the Spaniard Vallejo Nágera, whose first “Cervantine pathography” appeared in 1950.²² Both these authors are practicing psychiatrists—that is, physicians who are trained in the diagnosis and treatment of certain mental illnesses (basically those defined by Kraepelin: paranoia, manic-depressive psychosis, schizophrenia) and whose effort is concentrated on isolating the symptoms and describing them with the greatest possible accuracy, for the treatment depends on the diagnosis. When a clinical psychiatrist approaches a literary text, he focuses exclusively on instances of clearly pathological behavior, which he notes and then attempts to relate to a recognizable syndrome associated with a real mental disease. Since a cure is obviously impossible, literary criticism as practiced by the clinicians becomes exclusively a matter of diagnosis, or put inelegantly, making sure that the correct label is applied to the symptoms exhibited by a particular character.²³ Both Gutiérrez Noriega and Vallejo Nágera, as well as others, are convinced that in Don Quixote Cervantes has created in fiction a perfect representation of paranoia as defined by Kraepelin. Vallejo Nágera reports, in fact, that he used to give a class to medical students in which he offered Don Quixote as a model of paranoia, Tomás Rodaja as a model of deliriant schizophrenia, and Felipe Carrizales as a model of psychopathic jealousy, remarking that Cervantes achieved, “without consciously attempting to, the description of prototypes of mental illnesses which can serve as examples for psychiatric nosography, anticipating their classification and study by centuries.”²⁴

Both Pi y Molist in the nineteenth century and Vallejo Nágera in the twentieth coincide in the conclusion that Cervantes was in fact considerably in advance of current medical theory in his description of madmen. Obviously, he could not have invented his clinically accurate characters out of nothing, nor did he receive advanced training at some as yet undiscovered secret institute. His characters are rather the result of an interest in people and years spent observing them in jails and mental hospitals, taverns and inns, plazas and paseos. To this I would only add that Cervantes's interest in people, like that of all great writers, was so consuming as to constitute an obsession, and that he was obsessed not only by people but by the way they interact with each other and with their circumstances—in a word, by the phenomenon of life as a process.

Before proceeding to a couple of final observations, I should pause to remark that the “clinical psychiatry” approach to our novel is severely limited. It has the merit of demonstrating a great author's magnificent intuitions, but because it is static and not dynamic (in this sense akin to a definition of literary genre on the basis of accumulated formal characteristics), it cannot illuminate the structure of the work of art, nor can it elucidate for us the process of life unfolding, which of course is the business of the novel as a genre. As readers and literary critics, we are only marginally interested in having the name of Don Quixote's disorder; we are preoccupied instead with the web of relationships established between this particular madman and the particular objects and people with whom he comes in contact, how these relationships affect each other, how the world affects Don Quixote, and how he affects the world—and ourselves. We are much more concerned, in short, with the total phenomenon of verisimilitude—artistic re-creation of plausible reality, as defined by Aristotle—than we are with the particular detail of it encompassed in the clinical name for the hero's malady. Martine Bigeard, in her excellent study of madmen in Spanish literature of the Golden Age, after summarizing the contributions of Hernández Morejón, Kirschner, Vallejo Nágera, and Gutiérrez Noriega, concludes: “En assimilant le Quichotte à une fiche clinique et Cervantès à un génial psychiâtre, les études réduisent un chef-d'oeuvre aux dimensions d'un roman d'anticipation médicale et rebaissent son auteur au niveau d'un Jules Verne de la pathologie mentale.”²⁵

The foregoing begins to suggest how clinical psychiatry as a tool of literary criticism differs from psychoanalysis. Clinical psychiatry is static, concerned with the accumulation of examples of pathological behavior, which are in turn translated into symptoms, a syndrome, the name of a disease. This is an operation performed by the clinician on someone else; that is, the literary character exists for the clinician not as an artistically created complex human being but as an object without consciousness, a “fiche clinique” in Bigeard's graphic phrase. By contrast, psychoanalysis, like the novel, is concerned with process, with questions of motivation and behavior, cause and effect. These are literary questions, the bases for any discussion of plot and character. Psychoanalytical literary criticism treats literary characters as though they were real people; and people, as Ortega and Sartre (among others) have taught us, are distinguished by the possession of a history—an evolution through time—as opposed to an essence, and a consciousness of the fact of their existence in and through time. We are also characterized by complex mental processes that exist below the level of consciousness (as Freud, among others, has taught us) and that frequently determine our behavior. In psychoanalysis, the analysand comes gradually to perceive, consciously, the unconscious motivation for his sometimes bizarre and almost always self-destructive behavior. Through psychoanalytical literary criticism, the reader comes gradually to perceive the unconscious motivation for the character's behavior, and the rich, human complexity of the character's character stands revealed. As readers, we are then free to marvel at a great author's magnificent intuitions and, more importantly, to assimilate the character's humanity to our own, to participate most fully in that enhanced vicarious experience of life that great literature offers us.

Having gone out of my way to point out the limitations of the “clinical psychiatry” approach to Don Quixote, I want to close … by calling attention to an isolated observation by Carlos Gutiérrez Noriega which, had it been followed up by other investigators, or had he lived to follow it up himself, might have been the basis for a real elucidation of Don Quixote's character from a psychodynamic point of view.

Cervantes related the transformation of personality to the human ages of greatest vital tension, adolescence and climacteric, when real psychological mutations, sometimes of pathological dimensions, frequently occur. Only recently have psychiatric and psychological studies recognized that these critical times of life are replete with dangerous proclivities, and that the personality changes which occur on these occasions can develop in the direction of psychosis.

As examples of personality transformation in the climacteric he offers Felipe Carrizales of El celoso extremeño [The jealous extremaduran] and Don Quixote himself. Of Don Quixote he says, “He is a sedentary man, a great reader, who suddenly becomes an adventurer.” In both characters, he avers, “the entire tragedy and the principal novelesque motivation derive from an internal incident, a secret experience of transformation of the self, which suddenly impels them on a new course, a new form of adaptation to life.”²⁶

The present study is in a sense an exploration of the Peruvian psychiatrist's rather offhand observation. The idea that the characters' bizarre behavior at a particular point in the life cycle is “a new form of adaptation to life” is particularly rewarding. … Gutiérrez Noriega himself, however, associates the climacteric or “presenile” period with a withdrawal from active life, a coming to terms with being passive and sedentary for one's remaining years, and thus the opposite of adolescence—and of Don Quixote. Knowledge of the psychodynamics of mid-life and aging has evolved considerably since 1944. It provides an excellent point of departure for the study of Don Quixote as a verisimilar literary character who acts like a real person. …

Notes

1. Francis Johnson, “Elizabethan Drama and the Elizabethan Science of Psychology,” in English Studies Today, ed. C. L. Wenn and G. Bullough (London: Oxford, 1951), pp. 111-119. This passage was quoted by O. H. Green, “El ingenioso hidalgo,” Hispanic Review 25 (1957): 175-193, and the concept related to Cervantes, his public, and a particular theory of personality then current in Spain.

2. F. Alexander and S. Selesnick, The History of Psychiatry (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 101-102, quoted in P. E. Russell, “Don Quixote as a Funny Book,” Modern Language Review 64 (1969): 313.

3. P. Bassoe, M.D., “Spain as the Cradle of Psychiatry,” American Journal of Psychiatry 101 (1945).

4. Joaquín Fuster, M.D., “Origen y evolución de la asistencia psiquiátrica en el Instituto Mental de Santa Cruz,” Anales del Hospital de la Santa Cruz y San Pablo, Barcelona 20 (1960): 173-332. As befits his professional status, Dr. Fuster is more concerned for the extent and quality of patient care than for simple chronological priority. This is why he omits the purely confinatory facilities, e.g., London's Bedlam (1337) and Florence's Bonifacio “dei Dementi” (1377).

5. See J. Delgado Roig, M.D., “Historia del hospital de inocentes de Sevilla,” Actas Españolas de Neurología y Psiquiatría 16 (1941).

6. Quoted by Vicente Peset, M.D., in his Appendix to J. B. Ullersperger, Historia de la psicología y psiquiatría en España [1871], ed. V. Peset (Madrid: Alhambra, 1954), pp. 179-182. See also F. M. Torner, Doña Oliva Sabuco de Nantes, Biblioteca de Cultura Español (Madrid: Aguilar, 1935).

7. Available in a modern edition by Antonio Vilanova (Barcelona: Selecciones Bibliográficas, 1953). See also Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, Don Quijote como forma de vida (Madrid: Fundación March-Castalia, 1976), p. 139.

8. The four humors, in their traditional roles as determiners of human personality, are the “scientific” basis for a recent treatise on the control of tension. See Tim LaHaye, Spirit Controlled Temperament (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House, 1971).

9. Ullersperger, Historia, p. 89.

10. Ibid., pp. 90-91. On Alfonso Ponce de Santa Cruz see the doctoral dissertation of A. Escudero Ortuño, Concepto de la melancolía en el siglo XVII (Huesca: Imprenta Provincial, 1950).

11. Luis Astrana Marín, Vida heroica y ejemplar de Miguel Cervantes Saavedra, 7 vols. (Madrid: Reus, 1948-1958), 6: 383.

12. Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972), pp. 9-10, offers this summary of Huarte's three levels of intelligence. Because Huarte's theory of generativity anticipates important aspects of Chomsky's own thought, he plays down its basis in traditional humoral medicine. Huarte, however, insists repeatedly on the authority of Galen.

13. Mauricio de Iriarte, El “Examen de ingenios” y “El ingenioso hidalgo”: el Dr. Juan Huarte de San Juan y su “Examen de ingenios,” contribución a la historia de la psicología diferencial (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1948).

14. Peset in his Appendix to Ullersperger, Historia, pp. 166-178.

15. Green, “El ingenioso hidalgo,” briefly summarized in his Spain and the Western Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1966), 4: 61.

16. Cervantes, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Samuel Putnam, The Modern Library (New York: Random House, n.d.), Pt. I, chap. 1, p. 27. All subsequent citations are from this edition unless noted otherwise, and will henceforth be abbreviated in the text as follows: [Part] I, [chapter] 1, or I, 1.

17. C. P. Otero, “Introducción a Chomsky,” prologue to his translation of Noam Chomsky, Aspectos de la teoría de la sintaxis (Madrid: Aguilar, 1970), pp. xxv-xxviii.

18. Iriarte, El “Examen de ingenios,” p. 242. The same point is made in another context by Leland Chambers, “Idea and the Concept of Character in Don Quijote,” in Studia Iberica, Festschrift für Hans Flasche, ed. K.-H. Körner and K. Rühl (Bern/Munich: Francke, 1973), pp. 119-130.

19. Jacques Ferrand, M.D., Erotomania or a Treatise … of Love or Erotique Melancholy, trans. Edmund Chilmead (Oxford, 1640). See the excellent summary offered by Lawrence Babb in The Elizabethan Malady (East Lansing Michigan State University, 1951), pp. 128-130.

20. See Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Personajes y temas del Quijote (Madrid: Taurus, 1975), pp. 46-51. More recently, Michèle Gendreau-Massaloux has developed this theme and related it to Ferrand and other writers on melancholy in a paper presented at the Primer Congreso Internacional sobre Cervantes (Madrid, July 1978) entitled “Los locos de amor en el Quijote: psicopatología y creación cervantina.”

21. Antonio Vallejo Nágera, M.D. (de la Real Academia de Medicina), Apología de las patografías cervantinas (Madrid: Instituto de España, 1958).

22. Carlos Gutiérrez Noriega, M.D., “Contribución de Cervantes a la psicología y a la psiquiatría,” Revista de Neuro-Psiquiatría [Lima] 7 (1944), and “Cervantes y la psicología médica,” ibid. 9 (1946); Antonio Vallejo Nágera, M.D., Literatura y psiquiatría (Barcelona: Barra, 1950) and Tratado de psiquiatría (Barcelona: Salvat, 1954)—both of which contain chapters on the Quixote—and Apología.

23. See, for example, John H. Kirschner, “Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Study in Classical Paranoia,” Annali del Istituto Orientale [Napoli] 9 (1967): 275-282.

24. Vallejo Nágera, Apología, p. 9.

25. Martine Bigeard, La folie et les fous littéraires en Espagne, 1500-1650 (Paris: Centre de Recherches Hispaniques, 1972), p. 161.

26. Gutiérrez Noriega, “Contribución de Cervantes,” p. 154.