Thanks to a wonderfully suggestive hint at De Paul, I have now started delving a little further than usual into Freud's The Ego and the Id. Since the ego is nothing but a palimpsest of “abandoned object cathexes,” why couldn't we apply this theory to every object?
Let's think it in an Aristotelian way. Formal causes are in for a return in quantum theory, and in OOO, for somewhat similar reasons.