[Discreet follies. Variations on Don Quixote's folly]

Physicians and psychiatrists have been discussing through centuries about the madness of Don Quixote. The first in doing that was Philippe Pinel, followed immediately by many others. They all agreed in diagnosing Don Quixote as "monomaniac". Cervantes was considered an excellent "nosographer", and the novel a paradigmatic description of this mental disorder. After the Kraepelin's work, the old Pinelian nosography was substituted by a new system of classification of mental diseases, and Don Quixote was considered "paranoid". Finally, after the DSM IV, the usual diagnostic is "delusional disorder". Throughout history there have been two different types of mental disorders, being only one of them considered pathological. This difference appears in English in words like "crazy" and "mad." The thesis of this essay is that Don Quixote is more a crazy than a mad man. He is trying to achieve a world full of peace, justice and love. His moral ideal is to make possible the triumph of this perfect world. This crazy goal was deeply influenced by the Erasmian ideology. And Erasmus of Rotterdam was the author of a very famous book entitled The Praise of Folly, published the year 1509, almost a century before the novel of Cervantes. In this work, the word opposite to "loco" (crazy, mad, insane) is "discreto", a word of difficult translation to English, which means at the same time "shrewd," "discreet" and "ingenious". Cervantes says at the beginning of the second part of his work, that Don Quixote is doing in it "discretas locuras" ("discreet follies", trans. Thomas Shelton, 1620; "ingenious follies", trans. Tobias G. Smollet, 1755; "shrewd lunacies", trans. John Ormsby, 1885). This mixture of cleverness and lack of moderation is considered by the author the interpretation's key of the work.