Unamuno, Freud and the Case of Alonso Quijano

Abstract

VER SINCE FREUD wrote a psychoanalytic account of Oedipus and Jung analyzed Electra and Ernest Jones diagnosed Hamlet, there has been a growing psychoanalytic literature on the cases of other classical characters of mythology and fiction. It should come as no surprise that there is also available a psychoanalytic account of that most insane of literary personalities, Don Quijote de la Mancha. What may be a bit of a surprise is that such an account has been available since 1905 and was written by that (apparently) most un-Freudian of writers, Miguel de Unamuno. The book is Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho. If Vida de Don Quijote contains a Freudian study of Cervantes' creation, it is not strange that this has not been noticed before, because often we think of psychoanalytic accounts of our heroes as attempts to debunk the greatness of those heroes by showing that precisely what we find praiseworthy in them is nothing but the symptom of some psychic or emotional aberration. And it is well-known that, far from wanting to debunk Quijote's greatness, Unamuno saw as the task of Vida de Don Quijote the rescue of Quijote's greatness from just such a malicious attack on the part of Cervantes. Where Cervantes saw folly, lunacy and grotesqueness, Unamuno saw decisiveness, heroics and profundity. Where Cervantes approached Quijote with ridicule and cruel humor, Unamuno approached him with compassion and reverence. In Vida de Don Quijote Unamuno hoped to construct a truly Spanish philosophy of existence from precisely those Quixotic traits which Cervantes seemed to have condemned as exemplars of human folly in general and Spanish folly in particular. That Don Quijote was hopelessly mad Unamuno never denied, but Unamuno advocated Quixotic madness as a legitimate existential stance to be assumed by the individual who confronts an absurd universe whose only telos is one's own death.