Crossword clues for fixation
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Fixation \Fix*a"tion\ (f[i^]ks*[=a]"sh[u^]n), n. [Cf. F. fixation.]
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The act of fixing, or the state of being fixed.
An unalterable fixation of resolution.
--Killingbeck.To light, created in the first day, God gave no proper place or fixation.
--Sir W. Raleigh.Marked stiffness or absolute fixation of a joint.
--Quain.A fixation and confinement of thought to a few objects.
--Watts. The act of uniting chemically with a solid substance or in a solid form; reduction to a non-volatile condition; -- said of gaseous elements.
The act or process of ceasing to be fluid and becoming firm.
--Glanvill.A state of resistance to evaporation or volatilization by heat; -- said of metals.
--Bacon.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
late 14c., fixacion, an alchemical word, "action of reducing a volatile substance to a permanent bodily form," from Medieval Latin fixationem (nominative fixatio), noun of action from past participle stem of Latin fixare, frequentative of figere "to fix" (see fix (v.)). Meaning "condition of being fixed" is from 1630s. Used in the Freudian sense since 1910.
Wiktionary
n. 1 The act of fixing. 2 The state of being fixed or fixated. 3 The act of uniting chemically with a solid substance or in a solid form; reduction to a non-volatile condition; -- said of volatile elements. 4 The act or process of ceasing to be fluid and becoming firm. 5 In metals, a state of resistance to evaporation or volatilization by heat. 6 A state of mind involving obsession with a particular person, idea(,) or thing. 7 (context legal English) Recording a creative work in a medium of expression for more than a transitory duration, thereby satisfying the "fixation" requirement for the purposes of copyright law.
WordNet
n. an abnormal state in which development has stopped prematurely [syn: arrested development, infantile fixation, regression]
an unhealthy and compulsive preoccupation with something or someone [syn: obsession]
the activity of fastening something firmly in position
(histology) the preservation and hardening of a tissue sample to retain as nearly as possible the same relations they had in the living body [syn: fixing]
Wikipedia
Fixation may refer to:
- Fixation (psychology), the state in which an individual becomes obsessed with an attachment to another human, an animal, or an inanimate object
- Fixation (alchemy), a process in the alchemical magnum opus
- Fixation (histology) in biochemistry, histology, cell biology and pathology, the technique of preserving a specimen for microscopic study
- Fixation (population genetics), the state when every individual in a population has the same allele at a particular locus
- Fixation (surgical), an operative technique in orthopedics
- Fixation (visual) maintaining the gaze in a constant direction
- Fixation agent, a process chemical
- Carbon fixation, a biochemical process, usually driven by photosynthesis, whereby carbon dioxide is converted into organic compounds
- Nitrogen fixation, a process by which nitrogen is converted from its inert molecular form to a compound more readily available and useful to living organisms
In alchemy, fixation is a process by which a previously volatile substance is "transformed" into a form (often solid) that is not affected by fire. It separates the substance or object and puts it back in the same or different shape at a subatomic level.
Fixation is sometimes listed as one of the processes required for transformation of a substance, or completion of the alchemical magnum opus.
Category:Alchemical processes
"Fixation" is a concept (in human psychology) originated by Sigmund Freud (1905) to denote the persistence of anachronistic sexual traits. The term subsequently came to denote object relationships with and attachments to people or things in general persisting from childhood into adult life.
Fixation in orthopedics is the process by which an injury is rendered immobile. This may be accomplished by internal fixation, using intramedullary rod, Kirschner wire or dynamic compression plate; or by external fixation, using a spanning external fixator, Taylor Spatial Frame or Ilizarov apparatus.
Category:Orthopedic surgical procedures
Fixation or visual fixation is the maintaining of the visual gaze on a single location. An animal can exhibit visual fixation if they possess a fovea in the anatomy of their eye. The fovea is typically located at the center of the retina and is the point of clearest vision. The species in which fixational eye movement has been found thus far include humans, primates, cats, rabbits, turtles, salamanders, and owls. Regular eye movement alternates between saccades and visual fixations, the notable exception being in smooth pursuit, controlled by a different neural substrate that appears to have developed for hunting prey. The term "fixation" can either be used to refer to the point in time and space of focus or the act of fixating. Fixation, in the act of fixating, is the point between any two saccades, during which the eyes are relatively stationary and virtually all visual input occurs. In the absence of retinal jitter, a laboratory condition known as retinal stabilization, perceptions tend to rapidly fade away. To maintain visibility, the nervous system carries out a mechanism called fixational eye movement, which continuously stimulates neurons in the early visual areas of the brain responding to transient stimuli. There are three categories of fixational eye movements: microsaccades, ocular drifts, and ocular microtremor. Although the existence of these movements has been known since the 1950s, only recently their functions have started to become clear.
In the fields of histology, pathology, and cell biology, fixation is a critical step in the preparation of histological sections by which biological tissues are preserved from decay, thereby preventing autolysis or putrefaction. The structure of a tissue is determined by the shapes and sizes of macromolecules in and around cells. The principal macromolecules inside a cell are proteins and nucleic acids. Fixation terminates any ongoing biochemical reactions, and may also increase the mechanical strength or stability of the treated tissues. The broad objective of tissue fixation is to preserve cells and tissue components and to do this in such a way as to allow for the preparation of thin, stained sections.
In population genetics, fixation is the change in a gene pool from a situation where there exists at least two variants of a particular gene ( allele) to a situation where only one of the alleles remains. In the absence of mutation, any allele must eventually be lost completely from the population or fixed (permanently established in the population). Whether a gene will ultimately be lost or fixed is dependent on selection coefficients and chance fluctuations in allelic proportions. Fixation can refer to a gene in general or particular nucleotide position in the DNA chain ( locus).
In the process of substitution, a previously non-existent allele arises by mutation and undergoes fixation by spreading through the population by random genetic drift and/or positive selection. Once the frequency of the allele is at 100%, i.e. being the only gene variant present in any member, it is said to be "fixed" in the population.
Similarly, genetic differences between taxa are said to have been fixed in each species.
Usage examples of "fixation".
A great deal of water, remarked the brief, bitterish smile, would have to go over the dam before Phyllis Dexter--dimpled and rosy and twenty-three--could realize what it meant to have a double handful of deep-rooted fixations ripped out of your viscera or wherever they were located, and every dangling, aching, red nerve fibre of them coolly examined under a microscope.
Sir, putrefaction, Solution, ablution, sublimation, Cohobation, calcination, ceration, and Fixation.
Brendan started to detect a half-conscious salacity in the native fixation.
My point for now is simply that every Eros or Ascent brings a liberating force which can then, barring fixation or repression, be embodied in a wider Agape or compassion.
Liquid water as a solvent for micronutrients and for carbon dioxide, hydrogen as a source of energy for the fixation of carbon dioxide into organic molecules.
Since they entered into that world with all their physicality, the fixation of their assemblage points on the position preselected by the inorganic beings was so overpowering that it created a sort of fog that obliterated any memory of the world they came from.
He could feel, taste, smell, and see everything with an instant still intensity, the animate fixation of a vision seen instantly, fixed for ever in the mind of him who sees it, and sense the clumped dusty autumn masses of the trees that bordered the tracks upon the left, and smell the thick exciting hot tarred caulking of the tracks, the dry warmth and good worn wooden smell of the powerful railway ties, and see the dull rusty red, the gaping emptiness and joy of a freight car, its rough floor whitened with soft siltings of thick flour, drawn in upon a spur of rusty track behind a warehouse of raw concrete blocks, and see with sudden desolation, the warehouse flung down rawly, newly, there among the hot, humid, spermy, nameless, thick-leaved field-growth of the South.
The true cause of my initial fixation was not highfaluting injustice, but lowest-level filthy lucre, and once I had come to that demeaning truth, the obsession gradually dispersed.
Although most drovers had an overbearing fixation about having sons to follow in their footsteps, hardly any managed to maintain and provide for a family.
These aborted omega drives then become conditioned and thus appear as past fixations, but that is not how they started.
Since they entered into that world with all their physicality, the fixation of their assemblage points on the position preselected by the inorganic beings was so overpowering that it created a sort of fog that obliterated any memory of the world they came from.
He had been analyzed himself, analyzed and passed upon as a granite-willed, ultrastable outsidertough enough to weather the basilisk gaze of a fixation, walk unscathed amidst the chimaerae of perversions, force dark Mother Medusa to close her eyes before the caducous of his art.
Even if we go beyond Freud (which I trust we will), even if we expand our contexts beyond the isolated ego to the communitarian society, or to the whole biosphere, or even to God Thunderous and Almighty, this will not change the fact that if I have a really vicious oral fixation, I am not going to have an altogether fun time in life.
My fixation on my own mental concatenations was so intense that I completely missed what don Juan had said.
Even after decanting, he's still inside a bottlean invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations.