Saturday 16 September 2023

Cathexis - Cathect

Verb 

cathect (third-person singular simple present cathectspresent participle cathectingsimple past and past participle cathected)

  1. (transitive, psychology) To focus one's emotional energies on someone or something. quotations 
  2. 1978 [Simon & Schuster], M. Scott PeckThe Road Less Travelled, 2012, Random House (Rider), page 105, The feeling of love is the emotion that accompanies the experience of cathectingCathecting, it will be remembered, is the process by which an object becomes important to us. Once cathected, the object, commonly referred to as a 'love object,' is invested with our energy as if it were part of ourselves, and this relationship between the us and the invested object is called a cathexis.
  3. 1994, Howard Kamler, Identification and CharacterSUNY Presspage 56: Narcissism theorists talk about the work of the narcissism period being a "cathecting of the self." In fact, they should be talking about a "cathecting of the rudimentary self." Since all that gets cathected here are merely individually emerging ego self representations and not ego self structure—the latter amounting to an internally integrated network of agency dispositions—it really makes no sense to talk about cathecting a self per se.
  4. 2013, Carroll E. Izard, Human Emotions, page 193: Apparently it is possible for an individual to cathect any person, object, idea, or image. Of considerable importance to a possible analogy between cathexis and the emotion of interest, is Freud's notion that an individual can cathect thought or thinking as well as attention and perception.
  5. For Cathexis see 

    Cathexis see here

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