fixation
/fɪkˈseɪʃ(ə)n
/noun [mass noun]
1An obsessive interest in or feeling about someone or something: our fixation with diet and fitness...
- A colleague of mine is forever marvelling at the methodical way in which I flip over my rotating calendar each morning, not recognising in the gesture my complete fixation with time.
- The first to die, of course, are the young people, paying in blood for their generation's fixation with communication.
- He said it could have been a blurring between his feelings about women and fixation with celebrities.
Synonyms
obsession with, preoccupation with, mania for;
monomania, fetish, addiction, complex, neurosis, compulsion;
French idée fixe
informal hang-up, thing, yen, rage, bug, craze, fad, bee in one's bonnet
1.1 Psychoanalysis (In Freudian theory) the arresting of part of the libido at an immature stage, causing an obsessive attachment: fixation at the oral phase might result in dependence on others...
- The reasons for this arrest are not clearly specified; but it was assumed that fixation at the oral stage might be the result of either deprivation or overgratification of the infant's oral needs.
- In most of these cases we speak of psychological obsessions or fixations.
- The individual would have no conscious awareness of the nature of the fixation, but the libido would constantly turn away from the possibility of satisfaction in reality, towards a fantasy gratification.
2The action or process of fixing or being fixed: sand-dune fixation...
- Many surgeons remain advocates of cementless total knee arthroplasty; however, the majority of current procedures involve cemented fixation.
- Cementless fixation depends on prosthesis design plus ingrowth and overgrowth of bone to biologically bind the prosthesis to the skeleton.
- Cemented fixation relies on a stable interface between the prosthesis and the cement and a solid mechanical bond between the cement and the bone.
2.1The process by which some plants and microorganisms assimilate nitrogen or carbon dioxide: his work on nitrogen fixation in plants...
- Carbon dioxide fixation and light absorption takes place in the plant shoot parts, mostly leaf blades.
- Industrial fixation of nitrogen for fertilizer and other human activities has more than doubled the rates of terrestrial fixation of gaseous nitrogen into biologically available forms.
- These grass species carry out C4 photosynthesis, an important adaptation that increases the efficiency of CO 2 fixation in plants.
Origin
Late Middle English (originally as an alchemical term denoting the process of reducing a volatile spirit or essence to a permanent bodily form): from medieval Latin fixatio(n-), from fixare (see fix).