THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DON QUIXOTE

I know who I am’, said Don Quixote four centuries ago, but people can scarcely say the same now, in these confused times, and indeed Don Quixote himself might have echoed the sentiment (Cervantes, 1605-1615/2005). These words were spoken by Quixote at the dawn of the constitution of modern individualism, so that Don Quixote could figure in the history of psychol-ogy (Leahey, 2005). Indeed, as Leahey argues, Don Quixote could be considered “the first literary creation in which the conscience, character and personality of the protagonist are explored in an artistic fashion ” (p. 101). Moreover, we might even say that such psychological constituents are above all ‘literary creations’. In this sense, psychological literature, undoubtedly plural, would be ‘scientific recreations’. ‘Scientific literature’, as Sancho Panza might propose, extending the famous baciyelmo solution. With this in mind, we would have to recognize without scientific affectation the literary condition of the psy-chological subject. This ‘literary condition ’ refers, of course, not so much to ‘discourse ’ as to the life ‘course’ itself –that is, this ‘literary condition ’ is in the very unfolding of life, over and above the literary culture of each person. This implies the concept of ‘the inventio