What is catharsis?

Where the word comes from

Aristotle’s Poetics describes tragedy as achieving, through pity and fear, the katharsis of such emotions. The passage is brief, Aristotle does not define the term further, and commentators still disagree about whether he meant purgation, purification or clarification. No reading is settled, which is worth knowing before the word is used as though its meaning were obvious.

The clinical sense arrived much later. Breuer and Freud’s cathartic method sought relief from symptoms through the discharge of emotion, which they called abreaction. Freud later abandoned the method, in part because the relief it produced was often temporary.

What it means on this site

On this site, catharsis means a subjectively felt release of emotional tension after expression, exertion or immersion. Whether the cause of the tension changes is treated as a separate empirical question, not as part of the definition.

This is a working definition adopted by the project, not a consensus definition in psychology. Other authors use the word for purgation, for clarification, or as a synonym for venting, so findings stated in their terms do not map one to one onto this one.

Why the definition is doing work

Keeping the release apart from its effects is what makes the rest of the library possible. A concert, a good cry, an argument or a long run can all produce release. Each has been studied separately, and the answers differ: some of these leave a person calmer afterwards, some leave them more activated, and none of them, on their own, has been shown to change the conditions that produced the tension.

If catharsis is defined as “expression that resolves”, then every case where relief fades looks like a failure of the person. If it is defined as felt release, the fading is simply information about what release does.