Katharsis (κάθαρσις) — “purification” or “purgation.” The Greek term derives from the verb kathaírein, “to cleanse,” and from the outset carries a double register: a medical one, where it denotes the evacuation of harmful humors from the body (standard vocabulary in the Hippocratic Corpus), and a religious-ritual one, where it names the purification that makes a worshipper fit for worship. Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy transpose the concept to the soul: to philosophize is to purify it of the passions and of the body, separating it from the sensible to turn it toward the intelligible — a theme Plato develops in the Phaedo. Its most famous use, however, is Aristotle’s in the Poetics, in defining tragedy: by imitating actions that arouse eleos (pity) and phobos (fear), tragedy accomplishes the katharsis of these emotions in the spectator. The precise meaning of that phrase is one of the most debated puzzles in aesthetics. The main readings take it as emotional discharge or purgation, on the analogy of the medical model (Jacob Bernays’s interpretation, 1857); as a cognitive and moral clarification of the emotions, teaching us to feel them in the right circumstances (Martha Nussbaum); or as an ethical-pedagogical learning that refines character through compassion (a line associated with Lessing). The paradigmatic example is the spectator of Oedipus Rex, who, moved by the hero’s fall, finds his own emotions ordered and relieved. In the late nineteenth century, Freud (with Breuer) revived the notion in the therapeutic catharsis of psychoanalysis — a method developed from the case of Anna O. (1880) and codified in the Studies on Hysteria (1895). Katharsis thus engages with tragic mimesis and with the balance of the passions sought by Aristotelian ethics.
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