Abstract
Psychology of Don Quixote. The psychology of Don Quixote has two senses here. On the one hand it refers to psychology applied to Don Quixote, and on the other, to the psychology we can extract from him. The psychology applied here attempts to understand the personality of Don Quixote in accordance with the context in which he lives his life (his fictional life, of course), instead of projecting onto him psychological theories —current ones or those of his time—, as is usually the case in this kind of study. Naturally, the psychology applied also involves a theory, but with the peculiarity that its frame of reference is the constructive context itself, in this case of a character from literature (though it could equally be of a real person). The result is that Don Quixote is characterized by a mimetic melancholy and a literary madness - concepts that are also relevant to the melancholy and madness of people in real life. As for the psychology we extract from Don Quixote, it serves to illustrate the constructive principle of the person in real life. This principle, called indeed the Quixotic Principle, consists in a person's adoption of a new identity taken from literary models (or models of other types). The relationship between the new identity and the original person is analyzed in terms of the person/character dialectic. Given the generality of the Quixotic Principle, we show how everyday life is full of Quixotes (though few as courageous and worthy as Don Quixote).
