Catharsis is the emotional purification or release an audience experiences through tragedy.
In the 'Poetics' (c. 335 BCE), Aristotle argued that tragedy works on its audience through the arousal and discharge of pity and fear. Watching Oedipus blind himself or Antigone walk to her death, the spectator experiences a controlled flood of intense emotion and emerges, paradoxically, calmed. The Greek word katharsis carried medical and religious meanings — purgation, cleansing — and Aristotle borrowed both. The concept survived as a foundational claim about why painful art is pleasurable, and it underwrites everything from Shakespearean tragedy to modern grief memoirs and prestige television. Twentieth-century thinkers from Freud to Brecht argued and modified it, but the basic intuition — that representation can metabolise feelings the everyday cannot — remains literature's strongest defence.