Catharsis

katharsis

Catharsis — or katharsis — enters the depth-psychology corpus primarily through its Aristotelian formulation in the Poetics, where tragedy is defined as accomplishing, through pity and fear, a purification of emotions of that kind. The corpus reveals no settled consensus on what Aristotle intended: Nussbaum surveys the contest between ‘moral purification’ and ‘medical purgation’ readings, arguing for a third interpretive path that recovers the term’s retrospective coherence within the Poetics itself; Sorabji tracks the term’s elaborate philosophical afterlife from Aristotle through Stoic silence, Neo-Pythagorean revival, Iamblichus’s theurgical appropriation, Simplicius’s emetic model, Olympiodorus’s five-fold taxonomy, and finally Islamic misreading. Armstrong situates Aristotle’s literary catharsis within the broader context of mystery-religion initiation, reading it as ‘an experience of rebirth.’ Jung’s indirect presence is felt through the therapeutic analogue: the withholding of affect produces psychic morbidity, and communal disclosure functions as a social-psychological catharsis without the term being invoked by name. Rohde illuminates the archaic substrate — purification of the wandering soul through cycles of incarnation — that underlies both Platonic and Aristotelian uses. Moore connects catharsis to alchemical solutio and Ficinian purification. The central tension is whether catharsis is a purgation (something expelled), a clarification (something brought to light), or a ritual transformation — a debate that maps directly onto competing models of therapeutic action.

In the library 20 passages

the famous claim that the function of tragedy is ‘through pity and fear to accomplish the katharsis of experiences of that kind’ does not appear to pick up on anything that has gone before… It is a strong prima facie advantage for an interpretation of katharsis if we can show that it, unlike the others, offers the desired retrospective link.

Nussbaum argues that neither the ‘moral purification’ nor the ‘medical purgation’ reading of katharsis successfully integrates with the rest of Aristotle’s Poetics, and that an adequate interpretation must demonstrate retrospective coherence with the work’s earlier discussions.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

catharsis in the case of ecstasy, pity and fear, like medical catharsis, at least involves getting rid of something. And we can see from the passage that there is something to be got rid of, for Aristotle is talking of a predisposition to emotion which needs correcting.

Sorabji establishes that Aristotle’s catharsis fundamentally entails the elimination of a pathological predisposition to emotion, while cautioning against over-extending the medical analogy.

Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Aristotle’s theory of catharsis is, of course, a reply. Tragedy does good because it effects catharsis of such emotions. And which emotions? If he is to answer Plato, he will need to combine grief with pity.

Sorabji frames Aristotelian catharsis as a deliberate philosophical counter to Plato’s indictment of tragedy, requiring that grief and pity be jointly addressed by the purgative process.

Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Catharsis 224, 288–300; Aristotle’s application to drama 24–5, 80, 221; Aristotle’s answer to Plato’s complaint that poets stir up emotion 288; Application to music 288–9, 297; Seneca discounts theatre as using first movement, not emotion 76–81, 228, 294.

This systematic index entry maps the full arc of catharsis debates across Aristotle, Stoics, Neo-Pythagoreans, Platonists, and Islamic philosophers, demonstrating the concept’s reach across ancient therapeutic and aesthetic traditions.

Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

his famous literary theory that tragedy effected a purification (katharsis) of the emotions of terror and pity that amounted to an experience of rebirth.

Armstrong interprets Aristotelian katharsis as functionally continuous with mystery-religion initiation, reading tragic purification as a psychological rebirth rather than mere emotional discharge.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

some people are allowed by God to indulge in pleasures until they reach satiety (koros) and vomit. This is said to be a kind of catharsis which heals them.

Sorabji presents Simplicius’s emetic model of catharsis — therapeutic satiation leading to expulsion — as a late Neoplatonist synthesis that combines Iamblichus’s aversion therapy with Aristotelian purgation.

Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the comparative silence of the Stoics, it is the Neo-Pythagoreans and Platonists who revive interest in the subject… the theatre cannot produce Aristotelian catharsis, so Aristotle’s theory needs no further discussion.

Sorabji explains Stoic silence on catharsis by arguing that their doctrine of ‘first movements’ rendered theatre incapable of producing full emotion, and thus incapable of Aristotelian cathartic effect.

Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The idea of catharsis seems to have got lost in the medieval Islamic commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics. Avicenna’s paraphrase of Aristotle’s definition of tragedy omits the reference to catharsis altogether.

Sorabji documents the Islamic misreading of catharsis, in which Avicenna suppresses the concept entirely and Averroes misidentifies it with a moderation of emotion rather than a purgation.

Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

See David L. Miller, ‘Orestes: Myth and Dream as Catharsis,’ in Myth, Dreams, and Religion, ed. Joseph Campbell (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970) pp. 26-47; Leon Golden, ‘Mimesis and Catharsis,’ Classical Philology 64 (1969): 145-53.

Moore’s bibliographic notation signals the depth-psychological appropriation of catharsis through the lens of myth and dream, linking Aristotelian poetics to Jungian analytical practice.

Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

See David L. Miller, ‘Orestes: Myth and Dream as Catharsis,’ in Myth, Dreams, and Religion, ed. Joseph Campbell (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970) pp. 26-47; Leon Golden, ‘Mimesis and Catharsis,’ Classical Philology 64 (1969): 145-53.

The same bibliographic cluster in Moore’s 1990 edition reaffirms the cross-disciplinary connections between tragic catharsis, mythic narrative, and depth-psychological interpretation.

Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

medically — as purification (katharsis); the cult take notice of it only insofar as a number of priesthoods are expressly reserved for older women.

Burkert locates katharsis within ritual and cultic practice, noting that the medical conception of purification existed alongside — and was largely separate from — formal religious institutional observance.

Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

‘Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.’

Campbell develops a Joycean-Aristotelian analysis of tragic emotion wherein pity and terror function as vehicles of aesthetic arrest that connect the individual to universal human suffering and its hidden causality — the experiential core of catharsis.

Campbell, Joseph, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, 1986supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The ‘purification’ by means of which the soul gets rid of the defacement that has overtaken it during its earthly life reveals again the divine in man.

Rohde traces the Platonic-Orphic conception of purification as the soul’s recovery of its divine nature through progressive divestiture of corporeality — an archaic ancestor of the Aristotelian catharsis concept.

Rohde, Erwin, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

cathartic reactions often occur. There are many accounts of how naikan work has sent a shock wave through the world view of participants such that they emerge from the experience with a completely new outlook on life.

Brazier applies the cathartic concept to Naikan therapeutic practice, where structured retrospective reflection on relational obligation produces profound emotional disruption and psychological reorganization.

Brazier, David, Zen Therapy: Transcending the Sorrows of the Human Mind, 1995supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the repressed emotions are often of a kind we wish to keep secret. But more often there is no secret worth mentioning, only emotions which have become unconscious through being withheld at some critical juncture.

Jung’s account of withheld affect as pathogenic — and communal disclosure as restorative — constitutes an implicit functional analog to catharsis within the clinical frame, even without invoking the term directly.

Jung, C.G., Collected Works Volume 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy, 1954supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms