Catharsis

or, Does Letting It Out Let It Go?

A Drama in Five Acts, with an Intermission at the Valve

AristotleThe PhysiciansBreuer & FreudThe Punching BagThe Evidence

Almost everyone believes some version of it: feelings build up like steam, and a good cry, a shout, or a swing at a pillow lets the pressure out. The word for that belief is catharsis. It has had a long and strange career, and tonight's bill follows it from a Greek stage to a modern laboratory, where it ran into trouble.

Act the First

The Tragedian's Word

Athens, the 4th century BC. A theatre of stone.

Aristotle's Poetics defines tragedy as an imitation of a serious action that, through pity and fear, brings about the katharsis of such emotions. That is very nearly the whole of what he says about it there. He promised to explain the word and, in the text that survives, never did.

In ordinary Greek, katharsis meant cleansing, and it lived in two worlds: the doctor's (purging the body) and the priest's (ritual purification). Readers have argued over which one he meant for well over two thousand years.

PurgationTragedy draws out excess pity and fear, like a medicine.

PurificationTragedy refines the emotions, leaving them better tuned.

ClarificationTragedy makes the events, and our feelings about them, understood.

The purgation reading was made famous in 1857 by the philologist Jacob Bernays. Keep his surname in mind for Act the Third.

Act the Second

The Physicians' Purge

Any sickroom, for centuries.

Long before it meant anything about feelings, a "cathartic" was a laxative, and the word still means that in pharmacology. The medical picture behind it is simple and powerful: something harmful has accumulated, and health returns when it is expelled. Carry that picture over to emotion and you get the idea that grief or rage is a kind of build-up that has to be drained.

Act the Third

The Talking Cure

Vienna, the 1880s and '90s. A consulting room.

Josef Breuer: a physician, who called his treatment the "cathartic method"
Sigmund Freud: his younger colleague; co-author of Studies on Hysteria (1895)
"Anna O.": Breuer's patient, who named the method the "talking cure" and, jokingly, "chimney-sweeping"

Breuer and Freud reported that symptoms eased when a patient recalled a buried memory and expressed the feeling that went with it. They named this after Aristotle's word. The link was close to home: Jacob Bernays, the scholar of purgation, was the uncle of Freud's wife, Martha Bernays.

Freud himself soon moved away from the cathartic method. But the image stuck, and the 20th century spread it everywhere: emotions as fluid under pressure, which must find an outlet or burst out somewhere worse. Psychologists call it the hydraulic model.

Act the Fourth

The Punching Bag

A university laboratory. A bag hangs from the ceiling.

If the hydraulic model is right, venting anger should leave people less angry and less aggressive. Social psychologists set out to test that directly, and the results kept coming back the wrong way round.

In a well-known 2002 study, Brad Bushman had people who had just been insulted hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who insulted them. Afterwards they were angrier and more aggressive toward that person than people who simply sat quietly for a couple of minutes. An earlier study by Bushman, Baumeister and Stack (1999) found that just reading an article praising catharsis made people more eager to hit the bag, and no less aggressive after doing it.

A 2024 review by Kjærvik and Bushman pooled more than 150 studies of anger-management activities. Activities that calmed the body (slow breathing, relaxation, mindfulness) reduced anger. Activities that revved it up did not reliably reduce it.

Intermission at the Valve

Choose a way of "letting it out." The left gauge shows what the steam-pressure picture predicts for the feeling afterwards; the right shows what the research found.

The steam picture

The evidence

Pick one above. The needle points to how much of the feeling is left afterwards, compared with doing nothing (straight up).

Act the Fifth

The Relief Is Real; the Plumbing Isn't

The present day. Anywhere a person has just had a good cry.

None of this means the feeling of relief is imaginary. People do often feel better after crying, and writing about a hard experience seems to help some people a little. What the evidence argues against is the mechanism: that a fixed tank of feeling is emptied by expressing it, so that more expression means more relief.

A better-supported picture looks something like this:

Feelings run their course. Arousal rises and falls on its own; relief often arrives with the falling, whatever you did meanwhile.
Rehearsal feeds them. Replaying a grievance with fists or words keeps it vivid. That is why venting at someone who stokes it tends to backfire.
Calming the body helps. Slow breathing and relaxation lower anger more reliably than burning it off.
Making sense helps. When expression works (writing, talking, even a tragedy on stage), it may be because it turns a feeling into a story you understand.

Which brings us back to Aristotle.

Of the three readings in Act the First, the plumbing one, purgation, is the one the 20th century ran with and the lab undercut. The quieter reading, clarification, fits the modern evidence rather well: tragedy does not drain your pity and fear, it gives them a shape. Whether that is what he meant, no one can say. He never came back to explain.