cathect

Definition

To focus one's emotional energies on someone or something.

Etymology

Back-formation from cathexis and cathectic. A loan creation coined by British psychoanalyst James Strachey translating Freud’s German besetzen.

Example Sentences

• "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."
• "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."
• "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."