ABSTRACT
The author illustrates the usefulness of psychoanalytic concepts in understanding. He follows Sigmund Freud lead in his works on Leonardo and Dostoievski, nor the author's fictional characters, following in our own field Carroll B. Johnson's inaugural work on Alonso Quijano's midlife crisis, but rather the mechanisms of Cervantes's poetics. Freud's conception of jealousy is clearly useful in furnishing a theoretical framework for Francisco Ayala's original suggestion that homosexuality lies at the core of Anselmo's "oscura conciencia". Anselmo's curious self-diagnosis and prescription is indeed reminiscent of what Freud, in referring to "Dora's" first account of herself, called "an unnavigable river whose stream is at one moment choked by masses of rock and at another divided and lost among shallows and sand banks." Freud's conception of jealousy is clearly useful in furnishing a theoretical framework for Francisco Ayala's original suggestion that homosexuality lies at the core of Anselmo's "oscura conciencia".
