ABSTRACT
An analyst ready to confront madness is often impelled to take on the task by the child Cervantes once was, and who witnessed the kidnapping of Psyche through distortions of the truth. Lacking human interlocutors, the old children know how to speak to the soul of things, of plants or of Rocinantes. Cervantes starts by appealing to the child who loved books of chivalry and was “fond of reading even the very scraps of paper in the streets”. Then he sets his son loose in the space of five hundred new pages, with the avowed purpose of having him die. The universal success of the first Don Quixote is undoubtedly due to its role in the psychotherapy of war traumas affecting people all over the world, without exception. Like parents tired of their children’s antics, Cervantes wants to get away, to travel, leaving his lumbering son at home in the care of a team worthy of institutional approval.
