SOURCE: Johnson, Carroll B. “Psychiatry and Don Quixote.” In Madness and Lust: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Don Quixote, pp. 11-31. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983.

In the following essay, Johnson comments on Cervantes's knowledge of contemporary medical theories and ideas about psychology and madness and argues that in Don Quixote the novelist anticipates many of the discoveries of modern psychiatry.

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...