Fixation refers, in human psychology, to the state in which an individual becomes obsessed with an attachment to another human, an animal, or an inanimate object. It is a Freudian belief that a person could have:
- lacked proper gratification during one of the psychosexual stages of development, or
- received too strong an impression from one of these stages, in which case the person's personality would reflect that stage throughout adult life.
Whether a particularly obsessive attachment is a fixation or a defensible expression of love is at times debatable. Fixation to intangibles (i.e., ideas, ideologies, etc.) can also occur.
