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"fixation" is also used as a crossword clue. If that's what you saw, the answer is often fetish (6 letters).
Definitions
(histology) the preservation and hardening of a tissue sample to retain as nearly as possible the same relations they had in the living body
Word origin
From Old French fixation. By surface analysis, fix + -ation.
Used in a sentence
“Near-synonym: gelling”
“Increasingly it is being realised that a modern conurbation's transport problems cannot be solved if there is a fixation on profit and loss in public transport—[...].”
“Near-synonym: obsession”
Source: Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0
Used as a crossword answer1 curated clues
01“Obsessive focus”8 letters
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