The title of this essay brings together two controversial yet crucial areas of study within Cervantes scholarship. The concepts of psyche and gender, as I apply them to Cervantes' works, encompass the literary representations of psychological complexes – such as the unconscious and the manifestation and repression of desire – and of the sex/gender system. Their dynamics permeate not only the author's fiction, but many of the assumptions underlying its major critical approaches. No reader of Cervantes can fail to observe his abundant examples of literal and literary madness, of visual and verbal illusions, and of fragmented and fractured selves. The multiple ambiguities in his fiction, as well as the appearance of numerous “deviant” women and their relations with equally anomalous male partners, open the literature to an increasing range of psychoanalytical and gender-inflected analyses. My purpose in this chapter, therefore, is to trace the emergence of psychology and gender as vital categories of analysis, to identify their critical function in Cervantes studies, and to investigate the intricate relations between them.

Since psychology and its applied methodology of psychoanalysis intend an investigation of the mind’s unconscious workings, psychoanalytical readings attempt to understand the verisimilar mental processes in fictional characters that sustain our interest and lead us to empathize with literary protagonists.