Catharsis has been recognized as a healing, cleansing, and transforming experience throughout history, and has been used in cultural healing practices, literature, drama, religion, medicine, and psychology. Some contemporary modalities such as Psychodrama, Primal therapy, Emotion – Focused therapy, to mention a few, use catharsis as their core technique to achieve positive therapeutic change. Modern research on the subject is limited and presents contradicting data about the effectiveness of cathartic techniques in psychotherapy practice.
Defining catharsis
The word catharsis is derived from the Greek word which is translated as ‘cleansing’ or ‘purification’. Most of the definitions emphasize two essential components of catharsis: the emotional aspect (strong emotional expression and processing) and the cognitive aspect of catharsis (insight, new realization, and the unconscious becoming consciousness) and as a result – positive change. Aristotle defined catharsis as “purging of the spirit of morbid and base ideas or emotions by witnessing the playing out of such emotions or ideas on stage” (Aristotle, 2001, p. 1458).
Breuer and Freud described catharsis as an involuntary, instinctive body process, for example crying (Breuer & Freud, 1974).
Schultz and Schultz (2004) followed the psychodynamic tradition and defined catharsis as “the process of reducing or eliminating a complex by recalling it to conscious awareness and allowing it to be expressed” (p.506).
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The American Psychological Association (2007) also associates catharsis with the psychodynamic theory and defines it as “the discharge of affects connected to traumatic events that had previously been repressed by bringing these events back into consciousness and reexperiencing them” (p. 153).
Scheff (2001) emphasized both essential components of catharsis: emotional-somatic discharge and cognitive awareness which he called ‘distancing’, when the person experiencing catharsis is maintaining the ‘observer’ role rather than the participant, which involves a sense of control and full alertness in person’s immediate environment. Scheff indicated that it is most common that towards the end of somatic-emotional discharge the detailed, vivid recalling of forgotten events and insights often occur. There is a certain amount of confusion and misunderstanding about the definition and interpretation of catharsis: some of the researchers perceive catharsis as emotional discharge, equating it with the behavior of expressing strong emotions, some emphasize the cognitive aspect and the new awareness that emerges after reliving traumatic events from the past.
The historic roots of catharsis
The healing effect of catharsis has been portrayed in literature, theater, religion, cultural rituals, medicine, and psychology. Although it takes different shapes, the essence of catharsis remains the same: it is a release from some burden (either physical or mental) and furthers healing through its cleansing effect.
Aristotle’s understanding of catharsis
Aristotle used the concept of catharsis in both the medical and psychological sense. In Aristotle’s “Poetics”, it meant the emotional release and cleansing that spectators experience during and after watching a tragedy, which has a corrective and healing effect (Aristotle, 2001).
Aristotle also underlined the cathartic influence of music on people. In “Politics” he said: “All experience a certain purge [catharsis] and pleasant relief…cathartic melodies give innocent joy to men” (Aristotle, 2001, p. 1131).
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According to Aristotle, experiencing catharsis had moral and ethical implications. He believed that catharsis helped to moderate passions and strong emotions, therefore restoring the balance in one’s heart. Pleasure of sharing and reliving catharsis provided relief from disturbances such as pity and fear. According to Aristotle, emotional discharge while watching a tragedy helped to restore harmony and produced a wise and reasonable man.
Catharsis in literature and the theater
Different techniques have been used to provoke strong emotional expressions in the readers or spectators. The effect of surprise and unexpectedness could be used as the key factor that leads to catharsis. For example, in the Greek tragedy “Oedipus Rex”, catharsis occurs at the end when king Oedipus, driven by the guilt of impermissibility of incest and the emptiness caused by the loss of his beloved mother, blinds himself.
Catharsis can even have meaning that is more extensive. For instance, Bertold Brecht, the great German playwright and director of the twentieth century, considered it as a tool for a greater social change. Brecht used absence of consistent action to provoke a feeling of emptiness, build tension, and lead the audience to catharsis, which would make the audience undertake social and political action in order to escape from that feeling of emotional emptiness inside (Szczeklik, 2005).
Scheff (2001) indicated that humans seek and enjoy activities that help them to symbolically relive their own painful emotional experiences, and therefore achieve relief or resolution. For example, crying about Romeo and Juliet is nothing more than reawakening feelings of loss in the viewers’ lives and reliving unfinished personal experiences. Scheff emphasized the fact that literature and theater provide safe ‘distancing’ from peoples’ own experience. When personal distress is reawakened in a socially appropriate environment, such as theater, emotional experiences are not too overwhelming, because people are under the impression that they cry about the play character, but not about themselves.
Catharsis in medicine, religion, and cultural rituals
The idea of catharsis in medicine is similar to that in literature. It means ‘purging’, ‘purification’, although in a medical sense this implies a physical release, for example, expectoration of the sputa implies healing of cold. It was not until Hippocrates, that menstruation, diarrhea, and vomiting were regarded as cathartic processes (Scheff, 2001).
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Hippocrates associated catharsis with healing, because it’s role of a “purification agent” affecting the course of disease (both physical and mental).
The spiritual meaning of catharsis is very much the same: discharging everything harmful from one’s mind and heart, so that one can become pure. The ritual of purification usually implies that a person had engaged in some prohibited actions or sins. Catharsis helped to return to the previous status – before the violation of generally accepted rules and norms. In various religious practices, the action of purification is fulfilled with the help of water, blood, fire, change of clothes, and sacrifice. The rituals are often considered as part of a person’s healing from the devastating effect of guilt.
Further, the key mission of mysticism is to understand the return or unification of one’s soul with God. The ritual of baptism (purifying person with water) in Christianity has cathartic meaning of revival. Confession has the same underlying assumption, and it is similar to the concept of cathartic treatment introduced by Freud and Breuer, because confession involves the recall, revealing, and release of forbidden thoughts, actions, and repressed emotions.
Spiritual and cultural rituals have been known throughout the history to help people process collective stress situations, such as death or separation, or major life changing events like rites of passages, weddings, and such. Traditional societies have ceremonies of mourning, funeral rites, and curing rituals, which most often include cathartic activities, such as crying, weeping, drumming, or ecstatic dance (Szczeklik, 2005).
Similarly, modern forms of mass entertainment can provoke massive cathartic experiences, for example, movies like the “Passion of the Christ” directed by Mel Gibson, attracted mass audiences and became the socially acceptable way for collective crying. Another good example is the popularity of horror movies because they evoke intense fear emotions. It is apparent that collective forms of emotional reexperiencing and discharge in social, cultural, spiritual, or athletic events are highly popular, attract massive audiences and are known to provide relief and increase group cohesiveness and solidarity.
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Summary and Conclusions
Throughout the history of humanity, catharsis was considered to have a strong healing effect and was applied in medicine, religion, cultural healing rituals, literature, and drama. The concept of catharsis has been widely used in modern psychology, starting with Breuer and Freud. Some modern therapeutic modalities emphasize the value of expression of repressed emotions and use catharsis as the essential tool for the positive therapeutic change. While the supporters of cognitive-behavioral approaches dominate the field of psychology, most of the contemporary schools underestimate the importance of catharsis. They consider affect regulation as the primary goal, therefore leaving full emotional release in the periphery or often perceiving it as a negative direction.
The existing scientific evidence about catharsis resulting in a positive therapeutic change is controversial. The confusion occurs because of a lack of careful definition and agreement as to what constitutes catharsis. The research that ‘venting anger’ doesn’t automatically reduces anger demonstrated that aggressive behavior actually increased arousal levels and didn’t produce desired positive change, but its relevance to the phenomenon of catharsis is very limited if any. The complexity of phenomenon of catharsis involves experiencing repressed emotional traumas within safe and supportive environment, involving emotional discharge, as well as appropriate cognitive processing and insight.
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The Essay on Literature And Life Of Human Bondage And Beyond
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The Essay on Elements of Literature and The Combined Arts
At present, not all written works can be considered literature. To understand a good literary work, we should know first the important elements of literature. It is undeniable that the medium of literature is language, and language is composed of words that are combined into sentences to express ideas, emotions or desires. Writers, therefore, should be careful in their choice of words and ...
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Emotional processing, with special reference to post-traumatic stress disorders. International Review of Psychiatry,13,164-171.
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* To What Extent Is Literature Cathartic
It is a ubiquitous assessment that emotions are a part of every human experience; every human experience is a part of literature, and therefore every piece of literature contains extensive amount of emotion within itself. In this paper, three important points are raised to show that literature is readily used to regulate human passions instead of inflaming them. Second, ‘emotions’ are not adequately distinguished from imagination and when infused with different kinds of literature, become therapeutic healing the audience at a psychological level. Finally, emotions in literature lead to the purification of a human being, by providing an escape route from reality.
Catharsis – becoming conscious from unconscious; a sudden realization or a “release of emotional tension” (Dictionary.com) – has always been a hot topic for philosophers, and over the years many proposed opinions like chalk or cheese, trying to explain the association between emotions, humans and literature. However, the question still stands that ‘To what extent is literature cathartic?’ Recently, critics have devised that literature is incomplete without emotions, and it provides its audience with an escape route from reality
The idea of catharsis is a very old one indeed. It was first put into words by ancient Greeks, who referred to it as the feeling that sweeps over an audience at the climax of a tragedy. Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics used ‘catharsis’ and defined it to be the ‘purging’ of emotions in a human. Aristotle writes “Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete, and possesses magnitude; in language made pleasurable, each of its species separated in different parts; performed by actors, not through narration; effecting through pity and fear the purification of such emotions” (Aristotle, ).
Aristotle’s meaning is quite clear that our emotions get purged through pity and fear as we see the climax of the tragedy. It is really important to take Aristotle’s definition of tragedy into consideration; he describes tragedy as an imitation of action and nowadays most philosophers believe that a primary way of learning for humans is through imitation.
Catharsis is also closely related to the idea of schadenfreude, which is pleasure derived from the misery of others. However, the idea of catharsis is more pervasive than schadenfreude, catharsis in comparison can be defined as any emotional cleansing that occurs when you see someone in a worse condition than your own. This is the main reason why literature is so enduring. Peter Lamarque in his book The philosophy of literature argues that Aristotle’s use of the word catharsis is not a technical reference to purgation but a beautiful metaphor for the strange tragic pleasure, the feeling of being cleansed. This helps prove the point that literature and emotions coexist with each other and play an important role in regulating human sentiments instead of exacerbating them.
However, Friedrich Nietzsche had his own opinion on the idea of catharsis which quite boldly opposed Aristotle’s conclusion. Nietzche in an disagreement to Aristotle’s theory says “Not in order to be liberated from terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by its vehement discharge — which is how Aristotle understood tragedy — but in order to celebrate oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity — that tragic joy included even joy in destruction” (Nietzsche).
This quite simply means that tragedy does purify our emotion by creating fear or pity. Also, Nietzsche argues that the audience enters the tragic events not to free themselves off emotions but to ‘celebrate’ the tragic event as a necessary human experience. Furthermore, it has been scientifically proven that brain actually fires neural connections associated with behavior when we watch those behaviors —sports, horror movies, romantic movies, pornography— all result in release of pheromones which make our brain ‘relive’ the experience and thus learn from it. Therefore, it can be concluded that literature regulates human passions.
Secondly, Due to its cathartic nature, literature is a huge success in psychological therapies. Psychiatrists use literature to aid patients who suffer from deep stress and mental disturbance. To understand this phrase completely, one has to first define the terms. ‘Depression’ can be described as emotional confinement in a person’s mind, urging to come out, which causes nervous breakdowns in severe cases. On the other hand, “To be disturbed is to be agitated, to be in a state of turmoil” (Hanshe, 5).
However, both these condition are proof that one “feels”, that one’s brain is receptive, as it is the extreme side of emotions that causes these disorders. Many psychiatrists believe that literature provide confined emotions in a person with a medium to exit the body. Also, it has been proven scientifically that while writing both hemisphere of brain are used at the same time. This enables their experiences to become completely integrated into their mind, hence healing a person not only at the psychological level but also at a corporeal level.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis is renowned for his famous “talking cure”, which helped people around the world with hysterical symptoms by making patients narrate their traumatic experiences. If examined, talk therapy forces patients to tell a story [form of literature], and through that story emotions are able to exit ones body. In her book Song of Solomon Toni Morrison makes a parallel designating music as therapeutic. She explicitly debates that music was “For a long time, the art form that was healing for Black People” (Morrison, 340).
Furthermore, it can be extracted that Black music essentially serves the same purpose as talk therapy, but at the same time uses a different approach. Frederick Douglass in his narrative states that during slavery black music served to bring about emotional relief through cathartic expression. Moreover, one can argue that music can be a form of language and language itself can be a type of music, during slavery all slaves used songs as means of communication and medication. “Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy” (Fredrick Douglass).
This is also seen in a one’s daily life, people tend to listen to sad music when they feel sad and turn to happy music when feeling pleased. Consequently, music like the talking cure is a cathartic agency which provides a person with a unique way to discharge their emotions.
Thirdly, it is believed and proven that literature provides its audience with an escape land, taking them away from reality and resulting in purification of individuals. The word Catharsis in Greek means purification, while purging something means getting rid of it, purification means getting rid of the bad yet keeping the good. “The poet educates our sensibilities, by refining them” (Aristotle’s Catharsis, 1) meaning that, literature purifies an individual by refining ones emotions – getting rid of the bad but still clinging on to the good –. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that it’s the cathartic potential of literature that keeps people reading books. If a person does not feel good due to anything from sadness to stress, losing themselves in a highly emotional tale can result in purification. Seeing the stress that characters have to go through, and knowing that it is worse than what the individual is currently going through in a sense motivates the reader to keep fighting.
Two forms of literature which are mostly renowned to purify a reader are first poetry and second Japanese Manga. Poetry has been around since the beginning of mankind, in most countries it is still a way of communication for example “People in Somalia still use poetry as a means of communication” (Ayan) and for some it provides them with self-confidence. Poetry similar to songs can take a simple topic and emphasize it to a point that people forget about themselves and feel one with the topic. Furthermore, in his article “Writing the apocalypse” Rainer J. Hanshe states “We seek poem of pure reality…we seek nothing beyond reality” (Hanshe, 2) People turn towards poetry to yield cathartic comfort from knowing that, as bad as things are in the real world, they are not that bad and life all of sudden becomes relaxed.
Lastly, Japanese manga and anime industry is a rapidly growing industry which is solely based on the idea of catharsis. It makes use of intriguing story lines, emotional aspects of life and strong emotional themes – like friendship, love, betrayal – to communicate with the audience. Literature and fiction are enduring forms of entertainment for people because of the ‘emotional effect’ on the reader. Sometimes the reader is enthralled by a storyline because they are eager to see how much worse the situation can get for the character. Then the readers are able to discard all the doubts and bad emotions confining them, thus resulting in a person’s purification. However, sometimes readers simply want to experience something different from their regular life so they turn to manga to discharge the thrill – by being the one swinging large swords, shooting lasers and flying—alongside their favorite character. This fantasy though may be the form that catharsis takes, making the reader forget one’s own worries so that when one returns to oneself, all the troubles seem much easier to handle than before.
Wrapping it all up, the exact “function” of literature is still unknown, many interpretation devise many ideologies, creating a net of different ideas. Prior to this, I was situated in the middle not sure of literatures cathartic characteristics however, through meticulous research I now believe that it is fair to say that literature contains a hunk of cathartic characteristics, which not only aid a person on a psychological level but also purifies the individual. And even though emotions are irrational, when infused with literature readily regulate a person’s passions instead of inflaming them.