Gregorio Marañón and ‘the cult of sex’: effeminacy and intersexuality in ‘The Psychopathology of Don Juan’ (1924)

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Notes

Pedro Muñoz Seca and Pedro Pérez Fernández, La plasmatoria: farsa cómica en tres actos (Madrid: La Farsa, 1936), 46. Page references will be given parenthetically in the text.

In the Spain of the 1920s and 1930s there was little discussion of ‘bisexuality’ in the sense that we might use it, although ‘ambisexualidad’ was used occasionally. Bisexuality meant ‘bisexualidad inicial del organismo’, the germs of either sex within the embryo (Gregorio Marañón, Obras completas, 10 vols [Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1968], VIII, 326). References to the OC will be given parenthetically in the text.

‘Notas para una biología de Don Juan’, Revista de Occidente, Año II, Vol. VII (January 1924), 15–53 and in Gregorio Marañón, OC, IV, 75–93. ‘Psicopatología del donjuanismo’ appears in OC, III, 75–94.

For example, Arturo Farinelli, Don Giovanni (Turin/Rome: Ermanno Loescher, 1896); Gérard Gendarme de Bévotte, La Légende de Don Juan, 2 vols (Paris: Hachette, 1911); Víctor Saíd Armesto, La leyenda de Don Juan. Orígenes poéticos de ‘El Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra’ (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1968 [1st ed. 1908]); Ramón Pérez de Ayala, ‘El donjuanismo’, in Las máscaras (Madrid: Calleja, 1919), 347–50; Ramón Menéndez Pidal, ‘Sobre los orígenes del “Convidado de Piedra” ’ (1906), in Estudios literarios (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1968), 81–107; Ramiro de Maeztu, Don Quijote, Don Juan y la Celestina. Ensayos en simpatía (1925) (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1977); José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Introducción a un “Don Juan” ’, in El Sol (Madrid) (June 1921), reproduced in Obras completas, 6 vols (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1947), VI, 121–37; Otto Rank, Don Juan et le double (1913) (Paris: Payot, 1973); Gonzalo Lafora, Don Juan, los milagros y otros ensayos (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1927); Francisco Agustín, Don Juan en el teatro, en la novela y en la vida (Madrid: Editorial Páez, 1928). This list is not exhaustive. Don Juan Tenorio en la España del Siglo XX, ed. Ana Sofía Pérez-Bustamante (Madrid: Cátedra, 1998) contains a useful bibliography.

Jorge de la Cueva, El Debate, 18 December 1935, p. 4.

Thomas Alva Edison, The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison, (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 234. The diary was written between 12 and 21 July 1885. The final section, dedicated to ‘The Realms Beyond’, discusses the valve which can communicate with the dead.

Ralph D. Blumenfeld recorded attending a séance with Conan Doyle in the 1920s and viewing the photographs afterwards: ‘the double photograph showed between us what was said to be ectoplasm. To me it was like a cloudy smudge’, in Ronald Pearsall, Conan Doyle: A Biographical Solution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977), 232.

The painting is currently displayed at the Museo de Teatro in Almagro, Spain.

Marañón himself refuted the idea that he had exposed Don Juan’s homosexuality. See page 733 of this article.

It is interesting to note that the protagonist of La plasmatoria, in his limited sexual conquests of women, presents an ideal of masculinity which is closer to Marañón’s idea of the ideal model. This point is discussed in detail later.

Thomas Glick, ‘The Naked Science: Psychoanalysis in Spain, 1914–1918’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXIV (1982), 533–71. The first edition of Freud’s complete works in Spanish was translated by Luis López Ballesteros y de Torres with a prologue by José Ortega y Gasset, under the title Obras completas (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1922).

From an unpublished manuscript in the Fundación Gregorio Marañón, Madrid. The Fundación aims to publish this manuscript in due course.

Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relationships on the Human Condition (London: Penguin, 2000), 251–67.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3 vols (London: Penguin Books, 1990), Volume I. An Introduction, 39. Foucault writes that ‘there were two great systems conceived by the West for governing sex: the law of marriage and the order of desires—and the life of Don Juan overturned them both. We shall leave it to psychoanalysts to speculate whether he was homosexual, narcissistic, or impotent’ (39–40).

Due to its apparent interchangeability with ‘quantitative’ virility, ‘false’ virility therefore signifies over-sexed masculinity produced by an excessive quantity of sexual encounters, rather than their quality. In the Tres Ensayos de la Vida Sexual Marañón writes that the aim of quantitative virility is to ‘apuntar en un papel el número de las mujeres conquistadas’ (OC, VIII, 340).

See Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), 96–97.

Marañón, like most neurologists, relied on visual processes for the execution of his work. He used histology to chart the flow of internal secretions, and photography to aid his classification of morphological types. See, for example, his Manual de las enfermedades endocrinas y del metabolismo (Buenos Aires: Hachette, 1939). In his later work, his collaborator Dr Luis Arteta took care of the visual side of his clinical examinations. My thanks to Dr Fernández Molina for this information.

Foucault, The History of Sexuality, I, 119.

Juliet Mitchell writes that, ‘as the “talking cure” grew in popularity, so did the hysterical ability to imitate it. Lying has always been noted as a characteristic of hysteria’ (Mad Men and Medusas, 95). Freud himself, in ‘The Psychotherapy of Hysteria’, comments that one cannot believe the hysteric, which in turn affects the treatment of the hysteric (‘Studies on Hysteria. Breuer and Freud’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols [London: Hogarth, 1953], II, 253–305).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes: ‘I want to show my fellow men in all the truth of nature, and this man is to be myself’, and goes on to produce an exegesis of the confessions of his sexual life (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, ed. Patrick Coleman, trans. Angela Scholar, [Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2000], 4). I would like to thank Colin Tyler for this reference.

Sigmund Freud, ‘The Question of Lay Analysis: Conversations with an Impartial Person’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. Strachey, XX, 212.

Paul Julian Smith, The Theatre of García Lorca: Text, Performance, Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1998), 16–43.

Dale Pratt has written of the perceptions within Spain of the country’s own backwardness in the field of science at this time. See his Signs of Science: Literature, Science and Spanish Modernity since 1868 (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue U. P., 2001). See in particular pp. 1–14.

Marañón has written at length on the figure of Amiel in ‘Amiel: un estudio sobre la timidez’ (OC, V, 165–288).

Wilhelm Stekel, Onanie und Homosexualität: Die Homosexuelle Neurose (Berlin: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1917). For an account of onanism in Spain, see Richard Cleminson, ‘From the Solitary Vice to “The Rehabilitation of Onanism”: Changing Anarchist Discourses on Masturbation in Spain in the Early Twentieth Century’, Anarchist Studies, VIII (2000), 119–32.

Annette Kuhn charts the social message of this film, its appeal, and problems with British censorship laws, in her book, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–1925 (London/New York: Routledge, 1988), 75–96.

Pérez de Ayala, Las máscaras, 337.

E. Bonilla, ‘La lucha contra la vejez’, El Sol, 27 October 1927, p. 7.

See ‘Andalucía y Don Juan’, 89–90; ‘El sultán y el tenorio’, 90–92; and ‘El amor gitano’, 92–94 in Gregorio Marañón, Don Juan (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1940), reproduced in Marañón, Obras completas, VII, 216–18.

Letter from Santiago Ramón y Cajal to Gregorio Marañón, March 1928, from the archives of the Fundación Marañón, Madrid. There is no correspondence amongst Cajal’s files to suggest that Cajal was actively thwarted by any journalists or newspaper editors in his choice of topics.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Cuentos de vacaciones, (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1941).

For example, within the theory of atavism, the homosexual was considered an ancestral throwback. Foucault writes on the theory of ‘degenerescence’: ‘it explained how a heredity that was burdened with various maladies (it made little difference whether these were organic, functional or psychical) ended by producing a sexual pervert (look into the genealogy of an exhibitionist or a homosexual: you will find a hemiplegic ancestor, a phthisic parent, or an uncle afflicted with senile dementia)’, in Foucault, The History of Sexuality, I, 118.

Gonzalo Lafora, Don Juan, los milagros y otros ensayos (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1927); Hernani Mandolini, ‘Psicopatología del Don Juan’, Revista de Criminología, Psiquiatría y Medicina Legal (May–June 1926), 322–30; Ricardo Royo-Villanova y Morales, ‘Notas para una nueva biología de Don Juan’, Revista Española de Medicina y Cirugía, XIV (November 1931), 570–79.

Gregorio Marañón, ‘Sesión de 6 de octubre de 1928’, Anales del Servicio de Patología Médica del Hospital General de Madrid, IV (1928–29) (Madrid/Barcelona/Buenos Aires: Compañía Ibero-Americana de Publicaciones), 3–4.

See Kretschmer’s Physique and Character: An Investigation of the Nature of Constitution and of the Theory of Temperament (London: Kegan Paul, 1925). Marañón wrote a treatise on morphology, entitled, ‘Gordos y flacos’ (OC, VIII, 367–412). See also Cesare Lombroso, Los criminales (Barcelona: Centro Editorial Presa, 1911), for his account of ‘criminaloides’. Antonio Molero Asenjo writes: ‘Morfológicamente, se evidencian distintivos caracteres en estos criminales, apreciándose precoz sinóstesis, desarrollo pronunciado de los senos frontales, gran desarrollo del temporal y de las mandíbulas’ (Observaciones antropológicas de las anomalías en los criminales [Guadalajara: Daniel Ramírez, 1910], 18– 19).

Unfortunately all records of Marañón’s case histories of patients have apparently been lost, or at least, they are not held at the Fundación Gregorio Marañón. In ‘Gordos y flacos’, Marañón surmises that Don Juan types may be fat or thin depending on the fashions of the times (OC, VIII, 405–06).

F. Oliver Brachfeld, Polémica contra Marañón (Barcelona: Europa, 1933), 42.

James J. Bono, ‘Science, Discourse and Literature: The Role/Rule of Metaphor in Science’, in Literature and Science—Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern U. P., 1990), 59–89 (p. 59).

Lisa Cartwright writes persuasively of the importance of visual media in medicine in her book, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1995).

‘The Naked Science: Psychoanalysis in Spain, 1914–1948’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXIV (1982), 533–71.

Marañón seems to attempt to marry psychology with biology, but repeatedly he returns to the organism to explain pathology. Most significantly, his theories, unlike those of psychoanalysts, find no place for unconscious fantasies. His definition of fetishism, in 1930, for example, is that it is caused by a system of conditioned reflexes, a theory he derives from the work of Pavlov (Los reflejos condicionados: lecciones sobre la función de los grandes hemisferios [Madrid: Javier Morata, 1929], in OC, VIII, 618, n. 3).

Corpus Barga, writing a ‘protesta’ in name of the ‘criados de Don Juan’ against ‘Don Juan y los doctores’, writes that, ‘Don Juan no ha sido un hombre natural: ha sido, en el estricto sentido de la palabra, un prejuicio literario’, ‘Don Juan y los doctores’, El Sol, 19 December 1926, p. 1.

Michel Foucault, ‘The Discourse on Language’, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan-Smith, (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1972), 215–37.

For Marañón, bisexuality means initial bisexuality of the embryo and the existence of ‘germs’ of either sex within each person.

Presumably for this reason Marañón finds no irony in his own succumbing serially to the seductions offered by Don Juan’s psychosexual make-up. In his pursuit of the aetiology of Don Juan’s condition, he pursues the masculine stance of questor and adventurer.

Enrique Barco Teruel, Elogio y nostalgia de Gregorio Marañón (Barcelona: Barca, 1961), 41.

Bernardino de Pantorba, El pintor Salaverría: ensayo biográfico y crítico (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1948), 25.

See Nerea Aresti, Médicos, donjuanes y mujeres modernas: los ideales de feminidad y masculinidad en el primer tercio del siglo XX (Bilbao: Univ. del País Vasco, 2001), 137; El Liberal (Bilbao), 12 November 1927, p. 4 and p. 1. Dictionary references are from Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (Madrid: Real Academia, 1992).

Diccionario de la Lengua Española (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1992), 1223.

‘Postura de zape’, a ‘shooing motion’ presumably refers to effeminate mannerisms. In 1930 Marañón cites ‘el gesto de la mano’, ‘un gesto de adorno’ as characteristic of femininity (OC, VIII, 556, n. 2). He also writes that ‘estas actitudes o gestos del hombre homosexual no corresponden exactamente a los de la mujer’, they are, so to speak, ‘más estilizados’, ‘llegando a veces a caricaturizarlos, por eso son tan fáciles de imitar’ (OC, VIII, 613). Yet he also makes it clear that not all homosexuals exhibit intersexual secondary sexual characteristics. ‘Ladeao’ in this context may suggest the English term ‘bent’ which can mean ‘sexually deviant, homosexual’ (Collins English Dictionary [Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1992], 139). Meanwhile ‘que si sí, que si no’ suggests indecision over sexual object choice.

Sinfield writes that ‘up to the time of the Wilde trials—far later than is widely supposed—it is unsafe to interpret effeminacy as defining of, or as a signal of, same-sex passion’ (The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment [London: Cassell, 1994], 27).

Marañón provides an explanation of his use of the term: ‘al hablar de homosexuales, me refiero, naturalmente, sólo a aquellos en los que la inversión del instinto es un fenómeno evidente, hayan o no tenido relaciones homosexuales’. He also writes of a ‘secreto e inconsciente fondo homosexual’ (OC, VIII, 615, n. 1).

Smith, The Theatre of García Lorca, 13.

See also Gregorio Marañón, Don Juan (Madrid: Austral, 1940), 81.

See Richard Cleminson, ‘The Review Sexualidad (1925–28), Social Hygiene and the Pathologisation of Male Homosexuality in Spain’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, VI, No. 2 (2000), 119–29. The Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe 2001) cites ‘dicho de un hombre homosexual’ as the third meaning of ‘afeminado’. This third meaning was not acquired by the Dictionary until 1992, but our evidence from La plasmatoria suggests that the equation of effeminacy and homosexuality goes back much further. Furthermore, Gary Keller, whose book stands as the most thorough work on Marañón to date, writes that ‘the belief that Marañón implacably diagnosed Don Juan as a homosexual has entrenched itself so widely and deeply as to have become a topical assumption’. In the examples chosen by Keller from 1959 and 1960 of critical commentaries on Don Juan, we likewise find a switching between ‘effeminacy’ and ‘homosexuality’ as if they are synonymous. See Gary D. Keller, The Significance and Impact of Gregorio Marañón: Literary Criticism, Biographies and Historiography (New York: Bilingual Press, 1977), 237, n. 75.

Marañón, Don Juan, 81.

Letter from Cajal to Marañón, 1929, from the archives of the Fundación Marañón, Madrid.

Marañón, Don Juan, 109–10.

See Gregorio Marañón, Tres ensayos sobre la vida sexual (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1927), 185–86.

For Dagmar Vandebosch this pedagogical regard accounts for Marañón’s creation of a new genre for his writings on Don Juan, which is somewhere between literature and science. My thanks to Dagmar Vandebosch for forwarding a chapter from her thesis on the work of Gregorio Marañón.

Lyotard writes that ‘the state spends large amounts of money to enable science to pass itself off as epic’, yet whilst scientists ‘play by the rules of the narrative game’ they simultaneously reject narrative as an inferior form of knowledge representation. See The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Theory and History of Literature 10 (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 1989 [1st ed. 1979]), 27–28. Elizabeth Leane applies Lyotard’s theories to a discussion of the popularization of the work of Stephen Hawking in ‘Popular Cosmology as Mythic Narrative: A Site for Interdisciplinary Exchange’, in Crossing Boundaries: Thinking Through Literature, ed. Julie Scanlon and Amy Waste (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 84–97.

The references are to Chris Rojek’s definitions of the ‘celeactor’ in the present day. Celeactors are fictional characters who are either momentarily ubiquitous or become an institutionalized feature of popular culture. They ‘embody desire and galvanize issues in popular culture, dramatize prejudice, affect public opinion and contribute to identity formation’ (Celebrity [London: Reaktion Books, 2001], 21, 26).

According to George Chauncey, Gay New York: The Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (London: Harper Collins, 1994), 5. Paul Julian Smith has commented on the homophobic reporting of a ‘strange brotherhood’ that flocked to see García Lorca’s Yerma in 1934, ‘shrieking in the intervals and archly gesturing with “their finger on their cheek” ’ (The Theatre of García Lorca, 19). I have found no reporting of the presumed sexuality of audience members at La plasmatoria, although the end of the first act, in which Don Juan draws his sword threateningly against Marañón, apparently caused laughter which lasted for five minutes. See Gonzalo La Torre, La Nación, 19 December 1935, p. 14.

See This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age (New York: Columbia U. P., 1996), 78–79.

Carlos Serrano Alicante has shown how during the twentieth century, many theatrical reincarnations of Don Juan are parodies. See his Carnaval en noviembre: parodias teatrales de Don Juan Tenorio (Barcelona: Instituto de Cultura Juan Gil Albert, 1996).

Ricardo Royo-Villanova, ‘La medicina y los médicos a la cabecera de Don Juan’, Revista Española de Medicina y Cirugía, XIV (June 1931), 281–84 (p. 281).

For an interesting analysis of the attempts of clinicians visually to trace blood’s fluidity, see Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body, 82.

Laura Otis writes persuasively of the metaphors of contagion and bacteriology in the work of Conan Doyle and of Santiago Ramón y Cajal in Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-century Literature, Science, and Politics (Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins U. P., 1999), 64–89, 90–118.

Some critics of Marañón disliked his theories because they did not find them scientifically convincing, such as, for example, the writer Antonio Zozaya who wrote of his ‘invencible tendencia a estudiar rigurosamente y con procedimientos científicos lo que, por no ser real, no puede ser sometido a las experiencias del laboratorio’ (‘La obsesión donjuanesca’, El Liberal, 6 November 1929, p. 7). See Aresti, Médicos, Donjuanes, 133–77, for an interesting discussion of Marañón’s impact on contemporary theorists. The neurologist Gonzalo Lafora meanwhile, wrote that Marañón, ‘sin proclamarlo claramente, sin etiquetarlo con precisión, ha puesto el dedo en la llaga sobre el carácter histérico de don Juan’ (Don Juan, los milagros y otros ensayos [Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1927], 56. Some, such as Ortega, attacked Marañón simply because they wished to retain the traditional (though recent) view of Don Juan as a symbol of male irresistibility. Most liberal intellectuals derided the swaggering figure of Don Juan (Valle-Inclán, Baroja, Unamuno, among others). For an excellent study of the debunking of the Don Juan theme, see Ignacio Javier López, Caballero de novela. Ensayo sobre el donjuanismo en la novela española moderna, 1880–1930 (Barcelona: Puvill Libros, 1986).

It is worth bearing in mind that the outsider of Tirso’s drama, condemned by God, Church and Society, was tamed by Zorrilla in a re-working of Tirso’s mocker of human and divine values. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the popular view of Don Juan was based on Zorrilla’s play, which Spanish schoolchildren were taken to watch on 1st and 2nd November. José Alberich has shown how in the late nineteenth century Don Juan came to represent the reformed (Spanish) male whose love of a woman leads to his salvation (‘La popularidad de Don Juan Tenorio’, in La popularidad de don Juan Tenorio y otros estudios de literatura española moderna [Gerona: Ediciones Aubí, 1982], 13–24).

Polémica contra Marañón (Barcelona: Europa, 1933) 32. Ricardo Royo y Villanova y Morales uses Marañón’s theories of Don Juan to launch an attack on the medical establishment in general, declaring that ‘los médicos Don Juanes’ pursue the profession for its prestige, and in order to be surrounded by women. See Los médicos donjuanes: el nuevo donjuanismo (Madrid: Imprenta Castellana, 1930).

I would like to thank the following people for their help in the preparation of this article: Professor Alison Sinclair, Dr Richard Cleminson, Professor Tom Glick, Professor Dru Dougherty, Carmen Ibáñez Ularguí (Head Archivist at the Fundación Gregorio Marañón, Madrid), María Ángeles Langa Langa (Head Archivist at the Instituto Cajal, Madrid). The research was made possible by a grant under the Research Leave Scheme of the Arts and Humanities Research Board. I gratefully acknowledge the support offered by the AHRB as well as that of the colleagues who supported me in my application.