Human Development
Catharsis
Description:
The essence of aesthetic experience, said by Plato to consist of the freeing of the soul from the body and from passions and pleasures. Whether this term should refer to the elimination or the harmonizing of particular emotions is a matter of controversy; but its original sense involved purification or purging - the freeing from undesirable emotions through vicariously experiencing them represented on the stage; it has been used to describe aesthetic, ethical and medical phenomena.In psychology, catharsis represents the release of repressed emotions which the patient has previously been struggling not to express. This is one of the basic aims of psychotherapy.