Reflections on Cathexis

Research is…making the emotional dimensions of academics’ research visible

“…This interest has been considered through concepts that stem from Hochschild's (1983) notions of Emotion work that involves managing our private lives and context to navigate the socially constructed 'feeling rules'-rules that reflect social guidelines of how people should feel in specific situations (Hochschild 1979)-and Emotional labour, where our emotions become a commodity in a workplace or in the public realm, and where we are compelled to manage them appropriately for some economic exchange. The term 'cathexis'-has been introduced to describe both a dynamic process and intense state of concentration or investment of mental or emotional energy on one particular person, idea, or object (Connell 1987;Erwin 2002;Hoffer 2005)-which also affords a way to frame the emotional dimensions that academics invest in their research work.…”

Freud's Project and its diagram: anticipating the Hebbian synapse

“…Thus Freud, as cited below, used the abbreviation Qη to signify some form of quantity (‘Quantität’)—either flowing through a neuron or between neurons, or a more static entity within a neuron 8. The meaning of the curious terms ‘cathexis’ and ‘cathected’ have their origins in Greek and were introduced by Strachey as a much debated translation, or mistranslation, of Freud's ‘Besetzung’ and ‘besetzen’ 18. Cathexis appears to have been used in a neurological rather than psychological sense,19 and Freud seems to have envisaged that neurons, by being cathected, were in Wollheim's term ‘filled with energy’20 (ie, Qη) .…”