Cathect

Quick meaning: Cathect is a verb meaning (transitive, psychology) To focus one's emotional energies on someone or something.

Meaning

(transitive, psychology) To focus one's emotional energies on someone or something.

Example Sentences

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.

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.

1978 [Simon & Schuster], M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled, 2012, Random House (Rider), page 105, The feeling of love is the emotion that accompanies the experience of cathecting. Cathecting, 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.

Word Forms

• cathects
• cathecting
• cathected

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include concentrate, focus, orient, center, focalize, catharise.

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