Emotions in meaning-making: Toward a sociological theory of cathexis

• In Event: 30462 - Theory Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6. Theorizing Mind and Body

Abstract

The role of emotion in meaning-making remains to be largely undertheorized in cultural sociology. This paper aims to fill this gap by offering three major contributions. First, it re-introduces a sociological definition of cathexis, the notion coined by Freud and previously sociologically theorized by Parsons. Re-defined along the lines of Durkheimian cultural theory, cathexis refers to attaching emotions produced in social interactions to various objects participating in this meaning-making. Second, it provides a common framework for recently growing cultural research that deals with emotion in meaning-making. It thus can serve as a common denominator that allows putting various studies that reveal the role of emotion in meaning-making on the same board and informing each other’s development. Third, this article proposes an outline of five features of cathexis – persistence, pharmacology, boundary-making, spontaneity, and emergence – and two basic modes of cathectic processes – piety and transgression – that show how emotions inform meaning-making. The article further exemplifies these within the three thematic domains: perception, identity and social order, and ‘energizing’ the social action. Overall, these contributions allow for recognizing the emotional dimension of culture as its inherent and constitutive part.

NB: The earlier version of this paper has been accepted to ASA-2024, but I got sick and did not attend.

Author

• Dmitry Kurakin, The University of Virginia