ambivalencen.
/amˈbɪvələns/, /amˈbɪvəln̩s/, /amˈbɪvl̩(ə)ns/, U.S. /æmˈbɪv(ə)ləns/ 1.
a. Psychoanalysis and Psychology. The coexistence in one person of profoundly opposing emotions, beliefs, attitudes, or urges (such as love and hate, or attraction and repulsion) towards a person or thing.Ambivalence was coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler to denote what he and later psychoanalysts identified as a fundamental symptom or mechanism of schizophrenia (a word also coined by Bleuler).
ΘΚΠ
the mind > mental capacity > intelligibility > equivocal quality, ambiguity > [noun]
ambiguitya1325
doublenessa1513
ambiguousness1542
double meaning1551
indifferency1596
equivocacy1646
equivocalness1647
ambilogy1656
greyness1663
mealy-mouthedness1697
amphilogy1731
equivocality1735
grey1822
double-edgedness1901
ambivalence1912
ambivalency1912
the mind > emotion > love > [noun] > conflicting emotion combining love and hate
ambivalence1912
hate-love1915
love-hate1925
love-hatred1928
the mind > emotion > hatred > [noun] > conflicting emotion combining love and hatred
ambivalence1912
hate-love1915
love-hate1925
love-hatred1928
the mind > emotion > indifference > [noun] > coexistence of contradictory emotions
ambivalence1912
1912 Psychol. Bull. 9 171 He [sc. Eugen Bleuler] points in the first place, to the fact that every impulse is closely associated with its opposite, which he looks upon as a sort of protective mechanism and which he designates ambivalence.
1915 Psychol. Bull. 12 249 Ambivalence may be found in the three major divisions of mental function.
2010 Psychiatry Res. 178 11/2 Having made the case that ambivalence is an important aspect of schizophrenia, let us turn our attention to a more general understanding of ambivalence.
b. In general contexts. The condition of having contradictory or mixed feelings, attitudes, or urges regarding a person or thing. Also: the condition of being undecided about a viewpoint or course of action, or of being unconvinced by the merit of something; the state or fact of being contradictory or inconsistent.
ΚΠ
1917 Bookman July 467/2 We are impressed with the ambivalence of these situations.
1925 Bookman Nov. 326/2 The sensuousness and the intellectual ambivalence which are generally considered to be proof of the Jewish strain are not racially unique.
1946 Times 22 Jan. 5/3 Attraction to, and aversion from, personal rule have been the alternating and complementary themes of French history for more than a century. The same ambivalence underlies the political scene in France to-day.
1972 A. Storr Dynamics of Creation i. 3 Nothing is more revealing of his uneasy ambivalence towards artists than his own statements, which vary from denigration to adulation.
1989 S. J. Leonardi Dangerous by Degrees ii. 57 A Little Learning, embodies all the ambivalence about higher education for women that is the concern of this study.
2010 Times of India (Nexis) 26 Oct. Pakistan should shed its ambivalence on terrorism.
2. In a vibrating body: the fact or state of absorbing sound according to its acoustic properties as an emitter. Only in the principle of ambivalence. rare.
ΚΠ
1948 M. Joos Acoustic Phonetics 23 The principle of ambivalence, which states that any thing which is capable of emitting acoustic power linearly will also absorb acoustic power according [to] the same rules that govern its behavior as an emitter.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, March 2020; most recently modified version published online December 2021).
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n.1912