Catharsis

It is famously unclear what exactly Aristotle meant by “catharsis” (“purgation”) in Book VI of the Poetics, where the last part of the definition of tragedy is that “through pity and fear, it brings about the catharsis of such emotions”.

It is worthwhile to try to look at what the term has come to mean nowadays. Today, the OED says that catharsis is “the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions” – where “strong” is a typical interpretation of what the “such emotions” part meant in Aristotle,[1] but “or repressed” is actually mixing it with the Freudian definition, which I will explain next.

The Freudian definition is often given as “the process of reducing or eliminating a complex by recalling it to conscious awareness and allowing it to be expressed” – which seems to be accurate, but was written by a pair of historians (Schultz & Schultz, A History of Modern Psychology) and is often (e.g., here, here, and here) misattributed directly to Freud & Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria, where I believe it is not found. The best text I have seen on the development of the concept within psychology is this one. I think it is probably unrelated to Aristotle, but it is interesting to try to see it that way.

Merriam–Webster actually gives the Aristotelian and the Freudian definitions separately – “purification or purgation of the emotions (such as pity and fear) primarily through art” and “elimination of a complex by bringing it to consciousness and affording it expression”. Notably, the Aristotelian definition is translated almost literally, without trying to give a specific interpretation of what “emotions (such as pity and fear)” are. So the OED and M–W together seem to try tell us that the term has retained (one version of) its obscure Aristotelian meaning, but with the addition of Freud’s take on the concept as a possible sense of the word.

While the interpretation of catharsis as “purgation” in a sense of giving “release” to the emotions is common, and probably how the word should be used in (out-of-context) modern English usage, it is worth noting that Leon Golden has forcefully argued, in the last part of his Aristotle and the Arc of Tragedy, that there are various philological and theoretical grounds for reading “catharsis” in Aristotle as “intellectual clarification”. Sure enough, this definition is even listed in the LSJ. The idea seems to be, then, that the essence of tragedy is that it makes our emotions intellectually clearer to us.

In the case of the Oedipus Rex, which Aristotle analyses in the Poetics, this would happen through our realizing that Oedipus had to suffer for the prophecy to be fulfilled, so that his suffering fits into this larger cosmic context. As Golden himself says:

The events of Oedipus Rex, Othello, and Death of a Salesman are riveting and persuasive because we are convinced that necessary or probable forces (not irrational, aimless chance) are controlling the events that are unfolding in these mimetic representations and so leading meaningfully to deep learning and understanding about the human condition. That intimate and valuable connection between ourselves as human beings and the work of art is not made if we have recourse to interpretations of catharsis that bear no cognitive connection to the imitative pleasure that is a defining element of our humanity and, it can be argued, the very purpose of our being human.

[1] Addendum, 2022-12-25: I would take this typical interpretation to be exemplified by Malcolm Heath’s introduction to the Penguin edition of the Poetics, though it does not say so in so many words.