TIL a new word, cathect
(transitive, psychology) To focus one’s emotional energies on someone
or something.
* 2013, Carroll E. Izard, Human Emotions, page 193:
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.
Love it when my vocabulary is expanded.
Courtesy of Masha Gessen in Surviving Autocracy.