From Thomas F. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (1979), pp. 3-4 (quoted at The Library of Iberian Resources Online)

HISTORY seems scarcely distinguishable from myth. Historians, whether critical or not, at one point or another in their work, embody in the past values which seem to them to be the most significant or enduring of a given peoples' experience. Since values are culturally or socially defined, historians, from this perspective, engage in a process of myth-building. This is a proper role for historians, although not the only role, and I do not mean to disparage the part played by myth in all cultures, particularly as a context which makes the past something worth preserving and something intelligible to the present.

Yet certain national schools of historiography -- the Spanish is the case in point -- seem less able than others to disentangle present myths from past ones or to deal effectively and realistically with those aspects of the past which have been particularly productive of conflict or anxiety. I believe that the historian's role as interpreter of culture is analogous to that of the psychologist as interpreter of the individual psyche. In the middle ages conflict with the Muslims provided a very realistic basis for the fear of Spanish Christians, which became internalized both in individual psychologies and in collective norms regulating social distance among religious groups, and which finally were institutionalized in discriminatory laws and apparatus for enforcing them. To explain such phenomena as the Inquisition in terms of generalities like "intolerance" or "religious exclusivity," let alone such constructs as "nationalism," "capitalism," or the rise of the "modern" state, does not do justice to the social-psychological dimensions of the problem. For, long after the enemy was vanquished, the Jews expelled, and the Inquisition disbanded, the image of the "Moor" remained as the quintessential stranger, an object to be feared. Case histories in recent Spanish clinical psychology bear out this contention.

Transposed into the historiographical field, subconscious fears became transferred into bias that underlies historical interpretation and contributes to misinterpretation. Unless purged of such bias, the historian cannot play a valid role either as interpreter of the past or as a creator of myth for the present and future, no more than (and to the same extent as) a neurotic individual can interpret the strands of his own past conflicts that have brought him to his present state, or fashion functional guidelines for future adjustment.