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In a review of the psychological significance of words by Gorman,47 it is noted that words demonstrate the operation of unconscious processes; that words represent objects and the relationship between objects; and that words are charged with pleasureable or unpleasureable energic qualities when they are associated with conscious perception. According to Freud, “words form the major portion of our thought processes.”37
The subject of this article is that particular group of words denoting body parts, body functions and obscenity, which we shall group together under the heading of Body Words. Some of these, such as hand, are highly developed linguistically, having many meanings which are different from their objective biological meaning, while other body words such as clitoris, which names just one thing, are linguistically much less developed. The purpose of this article is to show, by means of linguistic, psychoanalytic, and neurologic data, that those body words which are highly developed linguistically carry a low investment of psychical energy or cathexis, while those body words which are linguistically underdeveloped carry a high cathectic content. (Cathexis is mental energy which is attached to a concept, or the dynamic image of an object in the subject's unconscious. “We believe that starting from a purposive idea, a given amount of excitation, which we term ‘cathectic energy’ is displaced along the associative paths selected by that purposive idea.”29)