Theories of catharsis: from katharsis to an empirical hypothesis

One word, three theories

Catharsis is used today as if it named a single, well-understood process: an emotion builds up, it is expressed, and the person is left lighter. The word has in fact carried at least three distinct theories, developed for different purposes and answerable to different kinds of evidence. The first is aesthetic and belongs to the interpretation of Aristotle. The second is clinical and belongs to the early history of psychotherapy. The third is empirical: a hypothesis about what happens to an emotion when it is expressed, which can be tested and has been.

Keeping these apart matters because each makes a different claim. An aesthetic theory of tragedy says something about what an audience gains from watching suffering represented on stage. A clinical discharge model says something about the cause of symptoms and how to remove it. An empirical hypothesis predicts that a measurable quantity, such as anger or distress, will be lower after expression than without it. Evidence against the third does not refute the first, and the authority of the first cannot rescue the third. This essay takes them in historical order and then asks what they imply for the distinction this site is built around: relief is not the same as resolution (see the working definition and Research note on relief).

Katharsis in Aristotle

In Greek usage katharsis belonged to two domains. In medicine it named the purging of harmful matter from the body; in religion it named ritual purification. Aristotle brought the word into the theory of art in one sentence of the Poetics (1449b), where tragedy is said to accomplish, through pity and fear, the katharsis of such emotions. He does not explain the term there, and no fuller discussion survives in the text as we have it.

Three families of interpretation have grown from that sentence.

Purgation. On the medical reading, tragedy arouses pity and fear in order to expel them, much as a physician induces a purge to remove an excess. The audience leaves with less of these emotions than it brought. This reading is the ancestor of the popular idea of catharsis, and it already contains the hydraulic assumption that an emotion is a quantity which can be drawn off.

Purification. On the ethical reading, tragedy does not remove pity and fear but refines them. Spectators learn to feel them towards the right objects, to the right degree. The emotion is not emptied but educated. Here katharsis is closer to training than to discharge.

Clarification. On the intellectual reading, the katharsis belongs to the events of the drama or to the spectator’s understanding of them. By following an action that is coherent and probable, the audience comes to understand why pitiable and fearful things happen. Katharsis is then a kind of insight reached through emotion, not a release of it.

None of these readings has won. The textual evidence is thin, each can cite other passages in Aristotle for support, and the choice among them depends partly on how one reconstructs his wider theory of emotion and of art. The site records this as an unresolved interpretive question (see Research note 01). The dispute is worth knowing for a psychological reason, however. The three readings map onto three possible answers to the empirical question that came much later: does expression remove an emotion, reshape it, or help a person understand something? Only the first is a discharge theory.

The clinical theory: discharge and abreaction

The second theory of catharsis appears in Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud’s Studies on Hysteria (1895). Their cases describe patients, most famously Breuer’s patient known as Anna O., whose symptoms were said to ease after they recalled a distressing memory and expressed the emotion attached to it. Breuer and Freud called the expression abreaction and the procedure the cathartic method.

The reasoning behind the method is worth stating carefully, because it is the source of the modern hydraulic picture. The model assumed that an experience normally produces an affect that is worked off through action, speech or association with other ideas. When that working-off is blocked, the affect remains attached to the memory, and the undischarged affect maintains the symptom. Recalling the memory vividly and expressing the emotion fully discharges the affect, and with it the symptom disappears. The model therefore treats affect as something like a conserved quantity: it does not dissipate on its own, it has to go somewhere.

Two features of this theory matter for what followed. First, it is a causal theory of symptoms. It claims not only that people feel better after expressing emotion, but that expression removes the cause of their difficulty. Second, the evidence offered for it consisted of uncontrolled case reports. There was no comparison with patients who recalled memories without strong expression, or who received attention and time without recall. Such reports can show that improvement followed treatment; they cannot show that abreaction produced it. The site records the discharge model as a historical theory, not as an established mechanism.

Freud himself moved away from hypnosis and the cathartic method towards free association, the interpretation of resistance and the slower process he later called working through. One reason given in historical accounts is that relief after abreaction was often temporary: symptoms returned when the conflict behind them had not been changed. The shift can be read as an early, informal version of the distinction between relief and resolution. Discharge could make a patient feel better for a while; something other than discharge seemed necessary for lasting change.

The hydraulic picture, however, outlived the method. It is intuitive, it fits common metaphors (letting off steam, bottling things up), and it offers a simple rule: expression is healthy, holding back is harmful. The popular term for this rule is venting, and the underlying picture is described in the glossary as the hydraulic model.

The empirical theory: a testable hypothesis

Twentieth-century psychology turned the hydraulic picture into a prediction: if a person expresses an emotion, the emotion, and the behaviour it motivates, should subsequently be reduced. This is the catharsis hypothesis in its empirical form. Its virtue is that it can be wrong.

Operationalising catharsis

Testing the hypothesis requires deciding what counts as expression and what outcome should fall. Much of the research concerned anger, because anger has a behavioural outcome, aggression, that can be measured in the laboratory. The typical design angers participants, gives some of them an opportunity to express the anger physically or verbally, and compares their later anger and aggression with those of participants who did something else or nothing.

What the anger studies found

In one of the best-known experiments, angered participants who hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who had provoked them later reported more anger and behaved more aggressively than participants who hit the bag while thinking about physical fitness or who sat quietly (Bushman, 2002). The result is the opposite of what the discharge model predicts. It is consistent with the view that expression accompanied by attention to the provocation rehearses the anger rather than using it up. The details are in Research note 02.

A 2024 meta-analysis of 154 studies broadened the question to activities that increase or decrease physiological arousal (Kjærvik & Bushman, 2024). Arousal-decreasing activities, such as slow breathing or relaxation, reduced anger and aggression. Arousal-increasing activities, including some forms of exercise, were not effective overall, although those studies were heterogeneous. For the empirical hypothesis, the conclusion is direct: in the domain where it has been tested most thoroughly, expression through arousal does not reliably reduce the emotion, and in some conditions it is associated with more of it (claim).

A meta-analysis of emotion regulation experiments points in the same direction from a different angle. Concentrating on one’s feelings was not an effective way to change emotional outcomes, whereas cognitive change had a small-to-medium effect and distraction was effective (Webb, Miles, & Sheeran, 2012). If venting is understood as sustained attention to the feeling and its cause, the regulation literature gives no reason to expect it to reduce the emotion. How venting fits into that framework is discussed in Theory 02.

Where expression did help

The empirical story is not simply that expression is useless. Two lines of research found benefits, and both are informative about why.

In studies of expressive writing, people who wrote about both the facts of a distressing experience and their feelings about it later showed health benefits compared with control groups. Analyses of the language they used suggested that benefit was associated with building a more coherent account over the sessions, with more causal and insight-related words, rather than with the amount of emotional expression itself (Pennebaker, 1997).

In research on the social sharing of emotion, people share most of their emotional experiences with others, and they generally find sharing helpful. Yet a review of the evidence concluded that findings were generally not consistent with the view that sharing alleviates the emotional memory (Rimé et al., 1998). A later experiment separated two things a listener can do. When the listener responded empathically, participants felt more connected and had an impression of feeling better; emotional recovery measured two days later occurred only when the listener stimulated cognitive work, such as reframing (Nils & Rimé, 2012). Theory 05 develops this in detail.

Taken together, these findings suggest that when expression is followed by measurable benefit, the benefit is tied to what the person does cognitively with the experience, not to discharge as such (claim). That is a theoretical interpretation of a pattern across studies with different designs and outcomes, and it is graded accordingly in the ledger.

Reasoning about relief and resolution

The discharge model makes a strong prediction that the evidence allows us to split into two parts. The first part, that people often feel relief after expressing an emotion, is compatible with a great deal of everyday experience and with the finding that people rate sharing as helpful. The second part, that the relief reflects the removal of the emotion’s cause, is not supported for anger and is at best conditional for distress more broadly.

Several mechanisms, none of them hydraulic, can produce the first without the second.

• Arousal passes. Emotional arousal declines with time. Whatever a person is doing when it declines may be credited for the decline.
• Attention and support. Being listened to can reduce distress in the moment and strengthen a relationship without changing how the event is appraised.
• Negative reinforcement. A behaviour that ends an unpleasant state is reinforced whether or not it addresses the cause, so a person learns to repeat it (Theory 06).
• Memory for peaks and ends. How an episode ends colours how it is remembered, so an episode that ends with release can be remembered as helpful even if its overall course was not improved.

Resolution, by contrast, requires that something changes: the situation, the meaning the person assigns to it, the person’s ability to cope with it, or what they learn from it. Expression can contribute to any of these, particularly when it is organised into an account or met with help to reconsider. Expression that only rehearses the grievance may instead keep the appraisal that generates the emotion active. This is the sense in which the artifact’s status line, problem_solved: false, is a claim about the gap between the two outcomes rather than a judgement that relief is worthless.

Where the theory remains contested

It would overstate the evidence to say that catharsis has simply been refuted. Several questions remain open.

The meaning of Aristotle’s term. Psychology cannot settle a philological dispute. A clarification or purification reading of katharsis is not tested by punching-bag experiments and is, if anything, closer to what the processing evidence describes.

Which emotion, which expression. Most controlled tests concern anger and aggression in laboratory settings with student samples. Grief, fear and shame differ in their action tendencies and social functions, and conclusions about anger do not transfer automatically.

Emotional arousal in therapy. Several psychotherapies deliberately evoke emotion during treatment, for example exposure-based therapies for anxiety, in which emotional activation is combined with corrective information (Research note on clinical perspectives). These approaches do not rely on discharge; they treat activation as a condition for new learning. Whether and when emotional intensity in itself contributes to outcome is an open empirical question.

Aesthetic experience. People seek out sad music, tragedy and ritual lament, and report that these experiences are valuable. Whether that value involves any reduction of emotion, or instead meaning, connection or reflection, is not answered by laboratory studies of anger (Theory 08).

Measurement. Outcomes such as “reduced emotion” depend on how emotion is measured. Self-reported relief, physiological recovery, later behaviour and residual intensity days later are different outcomes, and a study can find benefit on one and none on another (Research note on measuring emotion).

What this essay concludes

The history of catharsis is a history of a metaphor becoming a hypothesis. The discharge model gave the metaphor a clinical form, and the empirical tradition gave it a form that could fail. Where it has been tested most directly, it has not held: expression that rehearses anger is associated with more anger, not less. Where expression has helped, the evidence suggests that the help came from processing, connection and changed understanding, which are closer to the purification and clarification readings of Aristotle than to purgation.

The practical reading of this, stated as interpretation rather than finding, is modest. Feeling relieved after expressing an emotion is common and not in itself a problem. It is simply not evidence that anything has been resolved. For that, it is worth asking what, if anything, changed. The site’s process model essay and appraisal essay describe where such change can occur.