cathexis

In fact, it is arguable that what even the most ardent Vedantin physicists do is import into their description of reality emotional and physical cathexes from the sensorimotor realm.

Both resonating with Fassbinder and diverging from Sirk's cathexes, Darboven arranges an array of errant mementos: stationery from the Gramercy Park Hotel (creating a link to her and his time in New York); pre- and postwar German postcards, depicting bucolic vacation spots, pleasure craft, zeppelins, illustrations of soldiers helping their own on the battlefield, the destroyed "Hermann Goring Haus," an anonymous fraulein.

If we think about the cinema in these terms, we can imagine it as a space and process of identification unbounded, in which the spectator engages in multiple, often conflicting or contradictory cathexes not structurally organized or demanded by the cinema nor the film on the screen, but nevertheless occasioned by them.

Freud's hypotheses about infantile sexual traumas and their repression, his theories of erotic drives and the way civilization is built on "sublimating" them, his complexes and cathexes, his phallic symbols and Oedipal conflicts, penis envy and castration anxiety...most of these concepts have stood up very poorly against the contemporary scientific study of the brain, and all of them today sound quaint and slightly ridiculous.

Thomieres notes that these three characters find no respite from their cathexes, which drives these characters towards death, or, in Browns case, "death in life" (19).

Such cathexes become a bit more comprehensible upon analysis of research such as that reported by Posner (2002):

Mildly, she observes, "[s]ome women disagree with other women who claim sexual injury." (594) More strongly, she maintains that some "might even say that we insult women by attributing to them such milquetoast psyches that they can be imagined incapable of fomenting powerful phantasmatic cathexes and desires," (595) and so can be injured by sex.

While Roe creates self-deceiving memories, Pye, symbolically speaking, evacuates his forces (cathexes) from the lost object, the girl in the First World War, and then shifts them onto Prudence and then his own sister, who, as in the fort-da game, is in the state of "fort," "gone," put safely in a mental asylum.

Against the orthodox Freudian conceptualization of narcissism as innately fixed towards the actualization of distinction through authoritarianism and destructiveness, Fromm argues that it is possible to divert narcissistic cathexes into a common normative commitment to human solidarity.