Freud thought of cathexis as a psychic analog of an electrical charge.    From Wordnet, Princeton University. 

A cathexis is conceived to be analogous to an electric charge which can shift from one structure except in so far as it becomes bound – or to troops which can be deployed from one position to another.    From Wordnik.com.  [Word of the Day] Reference

I believe the first time and until today the last time I saw the word "cathexis," it was in a piece by Norman Mailer.    From Wordnik.com.  ["Something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary of the many nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos who run her campaign..."] Reference

It's the same mentality that chose to render Freud's Besetzung by "cathexis," Fehlleistung by "parapraxis," and Ich by "ego.".    From Wordnik.com.  [languagehat.com: SUBLATE.] Reference

There was a ton of cathexis going on in that relationship.    From Wordnik.com.  [Archive 2008-07-01] Reference

Hence also withdrawal of cathexis, for the process of decathexis.    From Wordnik.com.  [Word of the Day] Reference

A relatively constant cathexis of object and self representations.    From Wordnik.com.  [Clinical Work with Adolescents] Reference

Withdrawal from the parents results in increased cathexis to the self.    From Wordnik.com.  [Clinical Work with Adolescents] Reference

This seemed to be a defense against a very strong cathexis to her father.    From Wordnik.com.  [Clinical Work with Adolescents] Reference

I wrote cathexis, but it should have be catharsis, for the theatrical context.    From Wordnik.com.  [Congratulations to Jane Fonda!] Reference

SN: The trick is to produce a cathexis to the questions you ask and not to yourself.    From Wordnik.com.  [Site Three: Use, Pedagogy, and Addiction.] Reference

Object cathexis refers to energy invested in external objects as opposed to the self.    From Wordnik.com.  [Word of the Day] Reference

Hence also counter-cathexis, anti-cathexis: the energy invested in maintaining repression of a cathected process.    From Wordnik.com.  [Word of the Day] Reference

"Something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary of the many nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos who run her campaign...".    From Wordnik.com.  ["Something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary of the many nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos who run her campaign..."] Reference

But this collective cathexis that created Obamamania is obviously a deep desire for authenticity, and he is the natural repository of our hidden hopes.    From Wordnik.com.  [Hillary Agonistes] Reference

Althouse: "Something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary of the many nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos who run her campaign...".    From Wordnik.com.  ["Something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary of the many nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos who run her campaign..."] Reference

It is the cathexis that makes love both exquisite and painful but it is the "will to nurture one's own and another's spiritual growth" that makes it endure.    From Wordnik.com.  [Archive 2008-07-01] Reference

A parenthetical remark from Craig Keller: "One barely cognates Lubitschian mise-en-scène; apprehension happens faster than you can incant 'cathexis-anti-cathexsis!!!'".    From Wordnik.com.  [GreenCine Daily: DVDs, 5/11.] Reference

The core ideas of that theory, he argued, were laid out in the seventh chapter of Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams," which sketches a model of mental energy (cathexis).    From Wordnik.com.  [Daniel Kahneman - Autobiography] Reference

She's got her sights set on Hillary Clinton, and it's going to get ugly, with the hurling of dangerous words like viragos and cathexis and — my personal favorite — "sycophantish".    From Wordnik.com.  ["Something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary of the many nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos who run her campaign..."] Reference

The ego ideal, which originates in the stage of primary narcissism and is imbued with an aversion to object-libido involvement, is intimately associated with shifts in libidinal cathexis.    From Wordnik.com.  [Clinical Work with Adolescents] Reference

He was invested in a small chosen circle of intellectual friends but, indeed, was not free in an age-adequate fashion of intense libidinal cathexis to the original love objects, his parents.    From Wordnik.com.  [Clinical Work with Adolescents] Reference

Adolescence proper, or middle adolescence ages 14-17 is characterized by a more intense emotional life and a turning toward heterosexual love concurrent with increased withdrawal of cathexis from the parents.    From Wordnik.com.  [Clinical Work with Adolescents] Reference

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.    From Wordnik.com.  [Clinical Work with Adolescents] Reference

Given Vendler's cathexis to sweetness, it was probably inevitable that she would completely repress the arguments we advance in volumes I (The War of the Words) and II (Sexchanges) of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century.    From Wordnik.com.  [Feminism and Literature: An Exchange] Reference

"hanging still" as both lingering cathexis and deadly suspension we see the darker, interminable yearning of.    From Wordnik.com.  [Introduction] Reference

It is wordlessly in the voip phone adapter of his windcheater as ecosystem that the carillon is tucked by the cathexis of galvanometer.    From Wordnik.com.  [Rational Review] Reference

Anti aging beauty that it is a reversibly periodical to philaenus a few lapse in an cathexis imperatively trumpeter to a unfeignedly disorganized or ten vomer.    From Wordnik.com.  [Rational Review] Reference

Tylim 1978 focused on the unusual phenomena of adolescents’ withdrawal of cathexis from object representations and the shift of cathexis to self representations.    From Wordnik.com.  [Clinical Work with Adolescents] Reference

Orality and anality have waned, and the child’s focus and bodily cathexis are fixed on the phallic genitalia while the mental and emotional life is centered on the loved and forbidden oedipal incestuous objects.    From Wordnik.com.  [Clinical Work with Adolescents] Reference

I think you mean catharsis, not cathexis.    From Wordnik.com.  [Congratulations to Jane Fonda!] Reference

(231), which, as the pathos of rigor — the cathexis of boredom itself — functions as an unconscious recapitulation of contemporary "conditions of institutional life" (245).    From Wordnik.com.  [Professing Literature: John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man] Reference

She used the word "cathexis.".    From Wordnik.com.  [Congratulations to Jane Fonda!] Reference

The same is true of cathexis, eirenicon, gravamen, obelize, oriflamme, protreptic, or any of numberless other examples.    From Wordnik.com.  [VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol X No 3] Reference