Love—Real and Imaginary—in Cervantes’ Don Quixote (festschrift article)

I wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Paul Elovitz for opening up the rich context of psychohistory, the Psychohistory Forum, and Clio’s Psyche to many, including me. He has created a space for academic dreams and dreaming, a haven for interdisciplinary adventurers. As a celebration, in the spirit of applied psychoanalysis, multiverse, and dreamwork, I wish to contribute to it with this essay.

Here are a few thoughts I would like to share on the theme of love in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. I will reflect on Don Quixote in dialogue with Freud’s explorations of love in his “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” from 1907 and his “Observations on Transference-Love” from 1915. Cervantes’ Don Quixote was published in two parts: The first came out in 1605 and the second in

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1615. Don Quixote can be seen to reflect a transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque, with the complexity of love and a blurring of reality and illusion, and multiple perspectives being the central themes. These themes are also pivotal in Freud’s two aforementioned texts. Cervantes and Freud appear to ponder the real and imaginary aspects of love and, to my mind, also the creative and destructive power hidden in love or passions. Passionate internal states or dreams have the power to blur reality and even impose themselves on reality and consequently transform it. But passion also approximates madness. Cervantes and Freud seem to be thrilled by the power of passion and the uncertainty of the imaginary. At the same time, they consider the possibility of madness.

“What do you think about Don Quixote?” a teenage girl asks her friend. “I think it is a story about unhappy love,” the friend replies. “Mm, I agree, it’s the same as it is for us. It’s about hopes, dreams, and unrequited love. Always these same dramas and tragedies.” “Yes, exactly, so romantic – el caballero de la triste figura – the Knight of the Sorrowful Face. Yours until death” (personal communication, Summer 1990).

Harold Bloom (quoted in Cervantes, 2005) describes Don Quixote as a mirror held up to the reader, a story containing an endless range of meanings. Mirror, mirror, on the wall. As I did in my teens, I still see love in the enigmatic mirror of Don Quixote—though now it is not necessarily unhappy love but rather imaginary love that avoids happy realization and reality. I still tend to read “the Quixote” not so much as a tragic or a tragicomic story but as a tale about being brave, daring to dream, following one’s passions, and even as an ode to unconditional love, dreaming, and devotion to one’s task. However, as John Steiner (2020) puts it: “In his great novel Don Quixote, Cervantes describes the countless ways that his hero tries to impose his daydreams onto the world around him. This is precisely what many of our patients do, and the same is true, of course, for all of us since we are all patients and all have serious problems with reality” (p. 1).

Indeed, I think “the Quixote” defines a transition toward the baroque, complicated with multiple underlying meanings and perspectives. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in the era of the Copernican Revolution when everything that was known about the world seemed to come into question. Following the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1999), we could say that Freud, with his notion of man not being a master in his own house, continues or even com-

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pletes this Copernican revolution. Cervantes and Freud highlight uncertainty, dreaming, creativity, destructiveness, and the possibility of transformation.

When devoting himself to the mission of knight-errantry, Don Quixote, in accordance with the chivalric tradition known to him through novels, seeks a lady to love and worship. Seemingly crazed by reading and his withdrawal to a private fantasy world, it seems obvious to him that “the knight errant without a lady-love” is “a tree without leaves or fruit, a body without a soul” (Cervantes, 2005, p. 23). As it happens, Don Quixote soon discovers his lady-love! She is a very attractive, robust peasant girl he once was in love with—Aldonza Lorenzo—and she is now to become the lady of his thoughts, a princess he decides to call Dulcinea del Toboso. (Dulce means “sweet” in Spanish.) In Don Quixote’s view, she is a true sweetheart: lovable and generous but maybe as unattainable as the paradisiacal, pre-Oedipal mother’s breast. This seems to be the secret love message, or in Don Quixote’s chivalric expression, “O Dulcinea of Toboso, day of my night, glory of my grief, guide of my travels, star of my good fortune, may heaven grant all that thou mayest request just as thou considereth the place and plight to which thy absence hath led me and respondeth with the favor merited by my faithfulness” (Cervantes, 2005, p. 196).

For Dulcinea, the golden age and the magic of love Don Quixote might proclaim! A devotion bordering on madness seems to be at the heart of the quixotic attitude. But for Don Quixote, at least on the surface and in accordance with chivalric tradition, the key is not sensual but rather a “pure,” platonic kind of love.

In Cervantes’ tale, Don Quixote invents his love object. Of course, to some extent, this is what we all do when falling in love. Dulcinea is a kind of extreme version of an idealized dream image of the real Aldonza, and at the same time, she reflects Don Quixote’s idealized and disguised or blurred image of his own intentions. Don Quixote’s love for Dulcinea seems to lack conscious insight into internal motives as well as a dialogue with the real object: the actual Aldonza Lorenzo. Don Quixote and his Dulcinea never actually get to meet.

Freud’s take on love in his two texts discussed here is primarily, I believe, dream life, delusion, and love in the psychoanalytic setting. However, both Cervantes and Freud are intrigued by characters who appear to be crazed by reading or scientific endeav-

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ors and explore the characters’ “love madness.” They also both seem to consider the revolutionary—in the sense of the changing and even dangerous—power of love or passion. When discussing transference-love and the dangers residing in the psychoanalytic method and transference-love provoked by the psychoanalytic situation, Freud (1915) says: “The psychoanalyst knows that he is working with highly explosive forces and that he needs to proceed with as much caution and consciousness as a chemist” (p. 170). He goes on to say, “But when have chemists ever been forbidden, because of the danger, from handling explosive substances, which are indispensable, on the account of their effect?” (Freud, 1915, p. 171).

In Wilhelm Jensen’s tale Gradiva – A Pompeiian Fancy (1903), an archeologist, Norbert Hanold, becomes engrossed by the figure of a young woman in a Roman relief. He is especially intrigued by her way of walking and names her Gradiva, in reference to the Roman god of war, Mars Gradivus, walking into the war. In his reflection on Jensen’s novel, Freud (1907) highlights a process of healing through love. In his case, the archeologist, seemingly crazed by a scientific interest in the Roman relief and women’s feet, enters a delusionary fantasy world. He eventually finds a real woman he thinks is Gradiva, only to discover she is someone he already knows. Gradiva, whose real name is Zoe, is, like Don Quixote’s Dulcinea, actually a neighborhood girl. To fall in love is to seek or find what is already known but once had been lost, a repetition of an old map, as Freud (1915) has taught us.

In Gradiva, the repressed feelings of love or desire disguised in the protagonist Norbert Hanold are scientific passions that eventually reach realization. In Don Quixote, when the so-called reality imposes itself on the love story and the figure of Dulcinea, fantasy initially takes an even harder grip on the knight errant. It suddenly seems to Don Quixote that some evil, fierce magician has enchanted Princess Dulcinea to look like a peasant girl. It is as if now that she appears to be a neighborhood girl and threatens to become too real, physical, and attainable, she must be disenchanted and must remain an imaginary princess. The conclusion of Don Quixote seems to be that the princess, who now appears as an ordinary girl, needs to remain a figment of the imagination. Whereas in Jensen’s Gradiva, dreams, delusions, and reality are joined together, and lost love is regained through dialogue with Zoe, the real object.

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However, in Don Quixote, things also come to a turning point, though maybe more than they do in psychoanalysis, by way of Don Quixote’s self-reflection in dialogue not with the real love object Aldonza but through different adventures and encounters together and in dialogue with his squire Sancho Panza. The interplay of enchantment and disenchantment with Princess Dulcinea reflects perhaps Don Quixote’s struggle to accept a real love object, the real Aldonza, not only as an ideal fantasy person but as a living human being belonging to a separated, external “real” world. It is as if Don Quixote does not dare to let go of his imaginary princess and, consequently, of the ideal image of himself.

In his essay on Gradiva, Freud explores the distinction between healing through love in real life and psychoanalysis. Freud (1907) describes psychoanalytic treatment as “an attempt at liberating repressed love which has found a meager outlet in the compromise of a symptom” (p. 90). He further points out that in psychoanalysis, the reawakened passions “invariably chooses as its object the figure of the doctor” (Freud, 1907, p. 90). Freud (1907) considers the case of the Gradiva ideal in comparison to the one offered by the doctor and concludes: “Gradiva was able to return the love which was making its way from the unconscious into consciousness, but the doctor cannot” (p. 90).

Falling in love, or perhaps we should say falling in passion—be it in real life or the psychoanalytic setting—in some sense means becoming insane, letting go, and approaching the dream dimension of existence. Love produces infantile prototypes, or as Freud (1915) puts it: “It is true that the love consists of new editions of old traits and that it repeats infantile reactions. But this is the essential character of every state of being in love. There is no such state which does not reproduce infantile prototypes. It is precisely from this infantile determination that it receives its compulsive character, verging as it does on the pathological” (p. 168).

In real life, love dreams, or maybe we could say love scenes, these infantile prototypes are acted out. In psychoanalysis, the dreams or prototypes are to be explored within the realm of as-if. This is the signature of psychoanalysis. In psychoanalysis, love means transference-love, passions of love and hate stirred up by the psychoanalytic situation. In his observations on transference-love, I think Freud (1915) points to the explosiveness and dangers of passions, both love and hate, as well as the creative possibilities that occur simultaneously when these intense states are transferred into

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the psychoanalytic setting. Both real life and the psychoanalytic situation are stages to be played on. The dreamwork of love and psychoanalysis is to bring internal dreams or prototypes into motion and an exchange with external reality. But the methods are profoundly different.

I think Norbert Hanold of Jensen’s Gradiva and Cervantes’ Don Quixote have quite different kinds of love troubles. Norbert Hanold seems to be afraid of living his love dream, whereas Don Quixote seems to be afraid of reality. This brings to my mind the meaning of three words that I have come to contemplate while exploring the world of Don Quixote: quixotic, enchantment, and disenchantment. In the end, I wonder which perspective is more real: Don Quixote’s romantic view of Dulcinea being a princess or the so-called realistic, down-to-earth view of Dulcinea as Aldonza Lorenzo? Could it be that we, at this point, are considering the revolutionary power of love in real life and in the psychoanalytic setting? The passions of love in real life and psychoanalysis can set fixed reality into motion, enabling change, creativity, and healing.

The song “The Impossible Dream,” with music by Joe Darion and lyrics by Mitch Leigh from the Broadway musical The Man Of La Mancha from 1965, splendidly captures the creativity and the madness of a quixotic attitude as well as that of love and dreams. To each his Dulcinea, and to each the capacity to dream and love with devotion and passion and to impose dreams on reality. But also, implicitly said, in spirit, to each their own disenchantment. The song has been performed by many artists, including Elvis Presley in English, Paloma San Basilio in Spanish, and Jacques Brel in French. Inspired by a television interview with Jacques Brel (Caro R, 2013), I suggest we all are Don Quixote, or at least I hope we all are, for the sake of dreaming. I think the song “The Impossible Dream” reflects what Freud, in his writings on love and transference-love, and Cervantes’ in Don Quixote are exploring: the creative and destructive power of passion. This is at least what I have seen in the enigmatic mirrors by Cervantes and Freud here considered. Thank you, Dr. Elovitz, once again, for the Psychohistory Forum—a creative dream come true!

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