cathect

IPA: kˈæθʌkt

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

Examples of "cathect" in Sentences

Peck uses the word cathect divisively, claiming that people can only
Well, standards of proof amongst those who cathect on politics are low in general.
But there is not yet a self sufficient for him to cathect to in the way that he had cathected to her.
The wife refuses to cathect to the Libby trial because she says, with cause, that we've already been burned once by Patrick "Fitz!"
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.
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."
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.
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.