Definitions

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  • adjective Charged with mental or emotional energy

Etymologies

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Examples

  • The need to study Frankenstein's dream remains as ongoing and pressing as it has been for decades because it still causes us to confront what Victor Frankenstein's and the reader will not face steadily: the unaccommodated tugs-of-war between cultural tendencies that have been and remain "cathected" onto Frankenstein and the endless adaptations of it.

    Hogle, Introduction, Frankenstein's Dream, Praxis Series, Romantic Circles 2003

  • But such readings, while persuasive in different ways, posit a theory of history at the cost of not seeing history itself as also something cathected onto being, nature or self.

    'The Abyss of the Past': Psychoanalysis in Schelling's Ages of the World (1815) 2008

  • At the same time, temporality moves forward in a calendrical inevitability that gets cathected as promise.

    Phonemanography: Romantic to Victorian 2008

  • Hermannsschlacht, The Battle of Hermann (1808), cathected as the redundant sovereignty of one word,

    Introduction 2006

  • Hence also counter-cathexis, anti-cathexis: the energy invested in maintaining repression of a cathected process.

    Word of the Day 2005

  • This is fine for dealing with people who have heavily cathected their avatars -- a sanction against the avatar will act as a deterrent -- but many of the griefers and other more sociopathic problem characters will not be deterred.

    The inevitability of voice 2007

  • 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

  • Kohut 1971, an object is narcissistically cathected when we experience it not as the centre of its own activity but as part of ourselves.

    Why is it Always About You? Sandy Hotchkiss 2002

  • Kohut 1971, an object is narcissistically cathected when we experience it not as the centre of its own activity but as part of ourselves.

    Why is it Always About You? Sandy Hotchkiss 2002

  • Then, third, the certain insight that there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect.

    The Unknown Freud: An Exchange Blum, Harold P. 1994

Comments

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  • Frau Dr. Anna Kavalier was a neurologist by training who had been analyzed by Alfred Adler and had since gone to treat, on her paisley divan, the cream of cathected young Prague.

    "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay", Michael Chabon, p24

    August 9, 2007

  • Great book and great word. :-)

    August 9, 2007

  • See comment under cathexis.

    August 9, 2007