ABSTRACT
Cervantes's text is an excellent example of what Jung calls a visionary work of art. Written in the spirit of the times, Don Quixote appears to us as a foolish knight errant, perhaps even mad and delusional in his attacks on windmills that he perceives to be giants. And yet, in this visionary book, Quixote's quest is rooted in the spirit of the depths where he dreams what seems to be an impossible dream. It is a dream we are still dreaming, a dream that is dreaming us, a quest that now in our time has become, perhaps, even more crucial. In his dialogues with his humble squire, Sancho Panza, we are eavesdroppers, as it were, who, line by line, page by page, chapter by chapter are slowly but irresistibly drawn into questioning fixed beliefs about who is mad and who is sane, be they windmills or be they Giants, what is true and what is false, what is real and what is unreal, what is familiar and what is strange and estranging in its strangeness. This is the stuff that psychotherapists are made on, and Cervantes's visionary masterpiece is an indispensable guide for the education of the imagination. For, it is only through imagination that one can imagine windmills as giants, a possibility so unreasonable that our fixed dichotomies can be dissolved to reveal possibilities still to be dreamed.
