The last point raises the question of the topic of psychic aberrations in the history of a community.15 Psychohistory can indeed elucidate the correspondence of psychic disturbances and communal neuroses with numerous historical factors and trends: stresses and strains imposed by technological, social, and political constellations; cultural censorship; the failure of cultural and institutional remedies in the face of adverse psychic situations; flight from the dread accompanying attacks on the central core of a communal horizon; and repression of religious symbols and experiences.
Psychohistory can expose the psychological elements ingredient in cultural and intellectual decline; it can uncover psychopathological complications that color symbols and languages, that invade the realm of popular culture, that penetrate literary themes, that define the nucleus of deviant subcultures, and that constrict the range of questions asked. It can illuminate the psychic vectors behind such movements as medieval and Reformation messianism and modern political ideologies.16 It can reveal how such psychological needs as overcoming anxiety and achieving security have historically weighed down religions and ideologies.
The psychological need for security, or any pathological condition, however, cannot explain the existence of religion, art, literature, philosophy, science, and scholarship. Religion is rooted in experiences associated with the loving openness of the pure question and attached to archetypal and anagogic symbols.17 Art and literature portray the generic human wonder in its elemental sweep, exploring, against any narrow, limited, and secure viewpoint, the possibilities of human living (see next section).18 Philosophy, science, and scholarship are grounded in the pure desire to know, which challenges the boundaries of every concrete horizon.
Psychohistorians, rather than delving into the ultimate origins of religion, art, literature, philosophy, science, and scholarship, probe the psychic reservoir and undertow of cultural and intellectual creativity or diagnose the psychic distortions that inhibit and impair these forms of cultural and intellectual life. 
9. Barzun, Clio and the Doctors, 17-18, 148. "Their efforts are evidently to dispose of history and civilization, of human error and achievements, rather than to contemplate them. Unwittingly, motive becomes purpose; the desire to understand is undone by the rival desire to quell uncertainty through reductive ideas." Ibid., 84.
10. On Lonergan's treatment of the sensitive psyche and its bias, see Insight, 210-231; on the sensitive psyche as an "upwardly directed dynamism seeking fuller realization" (which includes Jung's notion of archetypal symbols and the symbolism of the "mystery" of the known unknown correlative to the sweep of inquiry), see ibid., 482, 569-72; on psychic development, see ibid., 481-83, 492-93; on the dynamics of the psyche as participating in the tension of limitation and transcendence at the heart of historical existence, see ibid.,498-503; on dread in relation to the psyche, see Phenomenology and Logic, 204-6, 284-89; McPartland, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, chap. 8.
There is an intersubjective dimension to the scotosis of the sensitive psyche. René Girard, for example, in Violence and the Sacred has argued for the role of mimesis in distorting desire and imagers, creating a false sense of autonomy. For applications to Lonergan's notion of the sensitive psyche and the transcendental imperatives, see Robert Doran, "Preserving Lonergan's Understanding of Thomist Metaphysics: A Proposal and an Example," 94-100.
11. The relation, for instance, of Michelangelo's sexual feelings to his work must be considered within the context of his neo-Platonism. See Howard Hibbard, Michelangelo, pp. 229-31, 233-35; Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber.
12. It is interesting to compare modern psychotherapy with the communal therapy of a primitive African tribe discussed by Rollo May in Love and Will, 331-33. May cites the example of a man who was cured of impotence by participating in a frenzied village dance dressed and acting as his mother.
13. See Eric Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic; Origins and History of Consciousness. For a reworking of Jung into Lonergan's framework, see Robert Doran, Subject and Psyche: Ricoeur, Jung, and the Search for Foundations. See also n. 5, above, for Lonergan's notion of the teleological dimension of the psyche, including Jung's archetypes and Freud's wish fulfullment (Insight, 482). Lonergan, in Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965-1980, 261-63, and Method, 68, commends Paul Ricoeur's effort, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, to retrieve an implicit teleology in Freud.
14. Peter Berger, "Towards a Sociological Understanding of Psycho-analysis," Social Research 32 (1965): 39.
15. Insight, 243. René Girard has emphasized how mimesis and its distortion of desire and images can foster a scapegoat mechanism that can pervade political society and religion. See Eugene Webb, Philosophers of Consciousness: Polanyi, Lonergan, Voegelin, Ricoeur, Girard, Kierkegaard, chap. 5; Worldview and Mind: Religious Thought and Psychological Development, chap. 5.
16. See ibid., 262, where Lonergan refers to Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony; Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium.
17. Method, 101-7; Insight, 482, 569-72, 711, 744-45; Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965-1980, chap. 20; Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion.
18. Insight, 208.
