Don Quixote and Don Quixotism

If I were to treat the epos of Don Quixote as if it were the clinical history of a mental patient, I should preface it with the following anamnesis. Alonzo Quixano, a petty noble of the Spanish province of La Mancha, became enamored, late in life, of Aldonza Lorenzo, a peasant girl of Toboso. In this love relationship our good man showed himself no great hero. In the twelve years during which his heart was filled to overflowing with love's longing, Alonzo ventured scarcely four times to gaze upon the face of his beloved, and on each of these occasions appeared so overcome with apprehension and embarrassment that any sort of active courtship on his part was quite out of the question. All the more did his fantasy become inflamed and mirror before him the most valiant and forthright proofs of his masculinity as a substitute for his obviously severe disturbance of potency.

Alonzo's scanty life history nevertheless reveals that his very choice of love object might explain a good many of his difficulties. The good maid of Toboso was a country Brünnhilde, of whom the chronicle narrates that she had "a voice loud enough for three, and in hurling the iron bar she was the equal of the strongest fellow in the place".

Our hero, on the other hand, was no Siegfried. His libidinal make-up is revealed by this brief extract from his past history: a passive-feminine individual, impotent probably all his life, in whom the pre-climacterium1 obviously stimulated sexual desire but at the same time gave rise to a fresh access of passive feminine strivings. Alonzo displays in his love episode the typical behavior of a boy in early adolescence. In his later