Ego Involvement and the Law of Exercise: Memorization as a Function of Ego Involvement in Folklore Scholarship and Anthropology

The article is a component in my “Folkloric Behavior”, a total innovation within my “Folkloric Behavior” (1967), which introduced a theoretical system for analyzing a folkloric phenomenon in a cognitive verifiable context. The universal psychosocial principles constituting the system were applied to a real (live) community: the ethnic Arabs living in Brooklyn, N.Y., USA, with particular emphasis on the Egyptian component. This approach stood in sharp contrast to the dominant Freudian psychoanalytic and Jungian analytical psychology theories that dominate this field. Terms, concepts, and processes offered in this innovative work are currently being used—often in isolation of their academic home and systemic links-- in various folklore fields. Examples of current usage are: “ego-involvement”, “learning process”, “extinction”, “motivation”, “intervening stimuli/cues [(re-presented as) “negotiations”, etc.). Ironically, my founding work on “Folkloric Behavior” is hardly ever evaluated or even mentioned. It would be useful to afford students of folk traditions and other readers the benefits of research objectivity of tracking the temporal sequence in which these key issues appeared in folklore scholarship. This step would be required for also establishing the history of ideas in a discipline.