IIn the more secular scheme set out for History of Mentalities, I have seen this shift in perspective as an advance in understanding of the textualized event as being one that now presumes hidden, unconscious forces at play in the person or action. Usually, the discovery of such hidden forces at play in history does not contradict or cancel out the motivations perceived by the first two approaches-that is, what are consciously understood by the participants in the event themselves or their contemporaries who are affected by these actions-but supplement and modify these other understandings. However, in rare instances, there is a marked disparity between the claimed purposes of an action or the felt consequences of a situation and the occluded dimensions of the event or personalities involved: this may be the result of developments over the longue durée that are below the threshold of awareness or belong to a category of repressed traumatic memories in the individual or the group. In such cases, where contradictions seem to be evident to the analyst using the methodologies of psychohistory, the interpretation should take into account the tensions obtaining between what is spoken and what is unspeakable, what is perceived and what is unimaginable, and what is felt and what is inconceivable.

In the last rabbinical approach, sod, there is a different kind of secret to be dealt with. Having breached the integrity of the received interpretation and begun to tease apart the textures of the target passage through analogy and explanatory supplementation, the exegete returns to the givens of the text with an awareness that it is not a seamless fabric. Through such manipulations as letter recombination, anagrammatic expansion and condensation, and numerical equivalence, the text is reconfigured to present alternative meanings and dimensions of implication than it initially seemed to yield. Often the rabbinical process enhances the scriptural passages that seem only to deal with historical or legendary (or exemplary examples) actions or legal and moralistic discussions with mystical, spiritual and theurgical revelations as constitute collectively kabbalah. Such secret meanings, however, remain predicated upon the validity and the authoritative or paradigmatic institutionalization of the primary interpretations into halachic law and communal customs. The sod, in other words, holds in suspension various levels of understanding and diverse degrees of sacred reality, in a tenuous, dangerous, but also exalting moment of engagement with the sacred texts.

In the history of mentalities, the discipline which permits psychohistorians to analyze then unknown forces in the past, this kind of shift in perspective back to the plain terms of reference originally measured in archival, archeological or experiential evidence, means treating individuals, groups, events and emotional states generated out of specific recollected moments as though they were the manifest content of a dream, and as such to be treated as having already passed through the various kinds of censorship and distortion known to occur in the mind on those elements of memory-from external and internal psychic processes-that belong to the latent content of the dream event. Whereas the manifest content belongs to recent experience of various kinds and to deal with aspects of the ego's anxieties, wishes, and drives, the latent content both returns to the dreamer's earliest experiences and to subsequent frustrating and traumatic engagements with reality. What is required of the analyst, then, particularly the psychohistorian seeking to understand the fantastic and delusional behaviours of historical persons and the strange outcome of public actions that defy political, economic and military logic or even basic common sense (the reality principle) is-not to dismiss the thematic and imagistic discourses operative in the documents or monuments being studied, but to understand them in relation to private experiences not registered (or not recorded clearly) in such evidence because they have been repressed, have lost previous contacts with earlier variations on the culture, or have not yet risen to articulation as they will in later generations.

If there are no explicit signs of childhood trauma, for example, then it will be necessary to seek out the traces of such profoundly disturbing experiences in the distortions to the development of individuals and groups (a development normally described in contemporary terms only by the use of mythical or legendary paradigms that smooth out, cover up, or deny the very disturbances the researcher is seeking to account for). This is a symptomatic reading, but one that necessitates a great deal of speculative and creative analysis to fill in the blank spots, measure the degrees of distortion in the landscape supposedly equivalent to its mythical ideals, and weight up the absences in a container said to be perfect in its dimensions but clearly askew.

Yet, as indicated earlier, at each stage in the process, as speculative and creative solutions are concocted, the researcher must diligently return to the sources-the original texts, the inter-texts and contexts, and the reconstructed pretexts and anti-texts-to search for the kinds of detail that previously had been invisible or unrecognizable. Such an intensified and refined attention can consequently focus on the original documents and artifacts and begin to see what Robert Liris calls “embedded texts.” In one sense, as Liris has demonstrated on the stone and bone relics at Glozel or the rock engravings in the southern Pyrennees, there actually are second and third-level “writings” inside the more obvious drawings and inscriptions, evidence that only emerges through electronic enhancement of photographs or manipulation of filters and other devices. On the other hand, such “embedded texts” are metaphorical, that is, imaginable and conceivable once new ways of thinking about the originals become operative.