Ancient Greece & Rome · 335 BC to Present · The Purification of Emotion Through Art
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.Aristotle — Poetics, c. 335 BC
Catharsis — in Aristotle's account the emotional effect of tragedy on its audience — is the clarification or purification of the emotions of pity and fear through the controlled experience of those emotions in the theater. The audience of a tragedy is moved to genuine emotional response by the suffering of characters they know to be fictional; this emotional engagement, rather than being merely pleasurable or merely distressing, has a clarifying effect — it allows the audience to experience and understand emotions that ordinary life either suppresses or presents in forms too chaotic and personal to examine clearly.
The concept has broader implications than its origin in dramatic theory. Any medium — art, music, literature, ritual — that allows the controlled experience of strong emotion can produce catharsis in this sense. The person who weeps at a film, who is genuinely moved by a piece of music, who finds that a novel has helped them understand an experience they couldn't articulate — these are experiencing forms of catharsis. The emotional encounter with the represented experience clarifies something about the actual experience that direct encounter alone could not.
Viktor Frankl's logotherapy and the broader tradition of narrative therapy draw on this insight: the story we tell about our experience, the form we give to it, clarifies it and allows us to relate to it differently. The person who can give narrative shape to a traumatic experience — who can say "this is what happened, this is what it meant, this is where it sits in the arc of my life" — has undergone something like catharsis: the experience has been digested rather than merely stored.
Aristotle's definition of tragedy in the Poetics — "an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude, through pity and fear effecting the catharsis of these emotions" — has generated more scholarly debate than almost any other sentence in the history of aesthetics. The word "catharsis" in ancient Greek could mean purgation (as a medical metaphor) or clarification (as a term from philosophy), and the two interpretations lead to quite different accounts of what tragedy does to its audience.
Freud adopted the catharsis concept from Aristotle (through Josef Breuer) in the early development of psychoanalysis: the therapeutic process, in the early theory, involved the cathartic release of repressed emotion. The patient was invited to relive a traumatic experience in a safe context, and the release of the suppressed emotional response was thought to alleviate the symptoms produced by its repression. While Freud later moved beyond this early cathartic model, the insight that emotions can be harmfully suppressed and that their controlled expression has therapeutic value remains central to most psychodynamic approaches.
The ancient Greek theater was explicitly understood as a civic institution with a therapeutic function. Attendance at tragedy was not a private pleasure but a communal practice, and the cathartic experience was understood as beneficial not only to individuals but to the health of the city. The capacity to feel pity for suffering and fear at the possibility of similar suffering — and to process those feelings in a controlled communal context — was understood as essential to the moral health of the community.
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.Edgar Degas — as attributed