A cleansing or draining-off of pent-up emotion.
A cleansing or draining-off of pent-up emotion — a releasing wash of strong feeling, classically through art (Aristotle's tragedy) and, in psychotherapy, through bringing feeling into the open.
Not itself an emotion but a process and outcome: a cleansing discharge achieved by passing through strong (often painful) feeling, classically vicariously, by watching tragedy. Unlike plain relief (a mere lessening of discomfort) or ecstasy (a peak of joy), catharsis is the renewal that comes after the storm — you feel catharsis after a wrenching film, a funeral, or a confession. Contrast grief, which is the painful emotion itself, not its resolution.
The purgation of pity and fear that tragedy effects in its audience.
From Aristotle's Poetics; the emotional/aesthetic sense in English dates to 1872.
The relief of tension by bringing a repressed complex to consciousness and giving it expression.
The Freud/Breuer “cathartic method”; first recorded in English in 1909.
1770 in English, “a bodily purging,” from Greek katharsis “cleansing, purging,” from kathairein “to purify,” from katharos “pure, clean.”
From medical “purging of the body” (1770) to the emotional/aesthetic sense (1872, via Aristotle) to the psychotherapy sense (1909, via Brill's translation of Freud).
What Aristotle meant by katharsis (medical purgation vs. moral/intellectual purification) is a long-standing scholarly dispute. Separately, the popular “venting releases anger” catharsis hypothesis has been widely challenged in psychology — expressing anger often reinforces rather than discharges it.