Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- transitive verb To invest emotional energy in (a person, object, or idea).
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- verb to inject with libidinal energy.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb To focus one's emotional energies on something.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb inject with libidinal energy
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Peck uses the word cathect divisively, claiming that people can only
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She refuses to "cathect" to the trial, and I would be derelict in my responsibility if I failed to point out that Microsoft Word 2002 does not recognize the existence of the word "cathect."
Ellis Weiner: Scribe Sees Boffo Vid as Veep Asst. Trial Preems 2008
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Well, standards of proof amongst those who cathect on politics are low in general.
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Well, standards of proof amongst those who cathect on politics are low in general.
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Even more conveniently, the left has the right's history of racism, the bloodstain on its nightshirt, onto which we can cathect all our hostilities in one easy swing.
Nancy Wadsworth: Down with Demonology: The Left Can Do Better 2009
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The wife refuses to cathect to the Libby trial because she says, with cause, that we've already been burned once by Patrick "Fitz!"
Ellis Weiner: Scribe Sees Boffo Vid as Veep Asst. Trial Preems 2008
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Hence the verbs to cathect, decathect, and hypercathect, the last referring to the defensive manoeuvre (see DEFENCE) of investing in one process in order to facilitate REPRESSION of another.
Word of the Day 2005
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But there is not yet a self sufficient for him to cathect to in the way that he had cathected to her.
Strange Affinities: A Partial Return to Wordsworthian Poetics After Modernism 2003
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Tylim, citing Jacobson (1964) and Eisnitz (1969, 1974), noted that because of the danger of the immediacy of forbidden incestuous parental objects, the teenager withdraws cathexis from object representations, to cathect the self-representation.
Clinical Work with Adolescents Judith Marks Mishne 1986
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Well, standards of proof amongst those who cathect on politics are low in general.
Libertarian Blog Place Various Libertarian Bloggers 2010
reesetee commented on the word cathect
Back-formation from cathexis.
August 9, 2007
pterodactyl commented on the word cathect
Every time I hear this word, I think of "decathecting", coined by Mike Doughty in this song.
April 6, 2008
super-logos commented on the word cathect
maybe with the help of a flying squirl?
August 27, 2008