The Power of Catharsis: From Ancient Stages to the Modern Mind

The term catharsis is often heard today, especially in discussions of therapy, art, and emotional release. It is usually taken to mean the discharge of pent-up feeling. Historically, however, catharsis carried a more exact meaning. In its classical forms, it referred not simply to release, but to purification—an emotional or psychic clearing that served a deeper ordering or clarifying purpose.

Without that second aspect, the overall effect is fleeting.

Aristotle and Plato: Two Very Different Purifications

The idea of catharsis comes into focus through the sharply different ways Aristotle and Plato understood purification.¹ The Greek katharsis originally referred to cleansing—medical, religious, or moral. Both philosophers used the term, but they applied it to very different human activities.

Aristotle introduced catharsis into aesthetics. In Poetics, he argued that tragedy performs a stabilizing psychological function. By arousing pity and fear within a defined dramatic structure, tragic drama allows audiences to experience intense emotion without being overtaken by it. Although Aristotle never spells out the precise mechanism, the dominant interpretive tradition understands catharsis here not as emotional purgation alone, but as the regulation or clarification of feeling. Emotion is not expelled, but shaped into a form that can be endured and understood.

Plato, by contrast, located catharsis not in art but in philosophy and spiritual discipline. For him, purification concerned the soul’s separation from bodily desires and confused attachments. Through moral training, intellectual rigor, and contemplative practice, the soul was to be cleansed of what distorted judgment, allowing it to approach truth and the Good. In dialogues such as Sophist, purification is described as a process of distinguishing the better from the worse within the soul itself.

This helps explain Plato’s hostility toward dramatic art in The Republic. Poetry and theatre, he argued, excite irrational emotion and draw the soul further into sensory confusion. Far from purifying, they interfere with genuine catharsis by strengthening the very impulses philosophy seeks to quiet. Art is, in his famous phrase, an imitation of an imitation—too far removed from truth to aid the soul’s ascent. Only later, in The Laws, does Plato cautiously reconsider whether art might play a limited, morally regulated role.

What separates Plato and Aristotle, then, is not whether catharsis matters, but where it properly occurs.

Art, Identification, and Emotional Containment

Aristotle’s account helps explain why the arts retain their psychological force. Theatre, music, poetry, and film provide settings in which strong emotion can be engaged without becoming unmanageable. Identification plays a central role. By witnessing another’s suffering at a distance, audiences can recognize their own fears while retaining enough separation to reflect on them.

Not all artists accepted this model. Bertolt Brecht rejected catharsis in his Epic Theatre, arguing that emotional resolution encourages passivity. When audiences leave feeling emotionally satisfied, he believed, they may feel little pressure to confront the social conditions that produced the suffering portrayed on stage. In this respect, Brecht’s concern aligns more closely with Plato’s than with Aristotle’s: emotional satisfaction can blunt moral and political response.

Freud and the Talking Cure

Freud encountered catharsis in a clinical rather than aesthetic setting. Working with Josef Breuer, he developed the concept of abreaction as part of what later became known as the Talking Cure. Psychological symptoms, they proposed, often arise from emotions tied to traumatic memories that were never fully experienced at the time.

Through therapeutic recall, these emotions could be released and the memory brought into conscious awareness. Freud was clear, however, that emotional discharge alone was insufficient. The aim was understanding, not expression for its own sake. Catharsis proved effective only when release was followed by insight.

Modern Use—and Misuse

In contemporary culture, catharsis is often treated as a good in itself. Emotional expression is encouraged, sometimes without regard for what follows. Yet psychological research suggests that expression without reflection can reinforce negative states rather than resolve them. Feeling is repeated rather than worked through.

Here, the older distinctions still matter. Catharsis is not the endpoint. Emotional release may begin a process, but it does not complete it. Whether in art, therapy, or personal life, purification without understanding remains unfinished.

The question, then, is not whether catharsis matters, but how it helps feeling give way to clarity.

Detail of Plato and Aristotle from Raphael's "The School of Athens."

References

1. Plato and Aristotle on Tragedy, Duke University online lecture notes. An overview of Plato’s critique of poetry and Aristotle’s defense of tragedy and catharsis. Duke University.
2. “Tragedy,” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Discussion of classical theories of tragedy, including Plato’s concerns about emotive art and Aristotle’s account of pity, fear, and catharsis. Encyclopaedia Britannica.