PubMed · 14407982
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S M JOURARD. 1959. Self-disclosure and other-cathexis.. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0041640
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Emphasis is placed in the difficulty in conceptualizing sexuality as a complex and controversial subject. This is a presentation of a concept based on freudian psychoanalysis. With this in mind, many of Freud's references are collected from the Brazilian Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. The following concept is arrived at: sexuality is an instinctive vital energy directed to pleasure, with the possibility of quantitative and qualitative variations, closely bound to homeostasis, to affection, to social relations, to phases of development of childhood-libido, to eroticism, to genitality, to sexual relations, to procreation and to sublimation.
This paper reexamines Freud's theory of "cathexis" (a quantity of motivational intensity invested in an object) in the light of recent developments in philosophy and cognitive psychology. Contrary to what is often thought, the quantitative element is defensible as a purely psychological idea. The notion of a cathexis is closely similar to the philosophical idea of an "intentional" state, which derives from Franz Brentano, Freud's teacher and mentor. Freud initially held the object of a cathexis always to be intrapsychic, a position which is untenable and which he largely abandoned after 1915, when he began (correctly) to take cathected objects generally to be persons or events, not their representations. His idea of a cathexis as "entering into" its object contains a valuable and neglected insight, which undermines the centrality of the distinction between the "outer" and "inner" realms of experience. This distinction should not be confused with the key distinction between "fantasy" and "actuality" with respect to cathectic objects. So-called "inner" (fantasy) objects are generally "inside" the mind in a metaphorical sense only.
Alternate axes are explored in the orthodox formulation of drive cathexis and psychosexual development, with implications for corresponding object relation modes engendered by these processes. Somatic and defensive aspects are shown to impact on the function of the "other" as the individual matures. The separation/individuation process is subsumed into this overall developmental continuum, and the centrality of the object as a focus in cathexis and drive delineation is critically evaluated. The homeostatic notion of equilibration is appealed to in synthesizing the factors emerging from the analysis.