the process of investing mental, emotional, or libidinal energy or significance in an object, person, or idea.

A psychoanalytic term designating an excitatory or urging force within the psyche, in contrast to an anticathexis (an inhibitory or checking force). According to Sigmund Freud, a psychoanalytic approach to our mental life focuses on the complex interplay of cathexes and anticathexes; that is, of excitatory and inhibitory forces.

Attachment, conscious or unconscious, of emotional feeling and significance to an idea, an object, or, most commonly, a person.

(psychoanalysis) the libidinal energy invested in some idea or person or object; "Freud thought of cathexis as a psychic analog of an electrical charge"

Freud's term for a healthy attachment or bonding of a patient and therapist. (Compare "transference". Contrasts with "resistance".)