“Don Quixote” by Cervantes (post 3): Don Quixote switches back to his regular personality, Alonso Quixano, confirming the diagnosis of multiple personality.

In post 2, I interpreted the episode in which Don Quixote was in a mountain, planning to purposely injure himself on rocks, as alluding to the biblical story in which Jesus meets the madman Legion, who has been in a mountain, bruising himself with stones. Legion got his name, because he was possessed by a legion of demons.

My interpretation is supported by subsequent use of the phrase “legion of demons” (1, p. 219) and by the episode at the end of the novel—while Don Quixote is in the process of reverting to his true identity of Alonso Quixano—in which he is trampled by “a herd of over six hundred swine” (1, p. 508). In the New Testament, when Jesus exorcises Legion’s legion of demons, Jesus sends the exorcised demons into a herd of swine.

At the end of the novel, the protagonist says, “…though in my life I was reputed a madman, yet in my death this opinion is not confirmed…I am no longer Don Quixote of La Mancha, but Alonso Quixano…I now abhor all profane stories of knight-errantry…” (1, p. 523).

Thus, Alonso Quixano’s “madness” had consisted of switching to an alternate personality, Don Quixote, and his “cure” consists of switching back to his regular personality. The only psychiatric condition with personality switches is multiple personality.

1. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Don Quixote. Translated, Abridged, and with an Introduction by Walter Starkie, and a New Afterword by Roberto González Echevarría. New York, Signet Classics, 2013.