Word of the Day for 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.

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