Word of the Day Archive
Thursday August 2, 2012
cathect \kuh-THEKT\
, verb:
To invest emotion or feeling in an idea, object, or another person.
Yet such sympathy becomes forceful through mass-cultural stereotypes, visceral and imaginative figures of woman as demon with which readers can easily cathect.
-- David Bruce Suchoff, Critical Theory and the Novel
We cathect something whenever we invest emotional energy in it, whether that something be another person, a rose garden, playing golf, or hating lessons.
-- Morgan Scott Peck, Golf and the Spirit
Cathect is a backformation that emerged in the 1930s. It comes from the idea of cathexis from Sigmund Freud's term for emotional investment.
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for cathect
