Most people today believe that the word catharsis refers to the necessary release of negative emotions and destructive impulses for the sake of “purging” oneself of those emotions and impulses. Many people see this “purging” of negative emotions—usually specifically anger—as healthy or even necessary. This idea of catharsis as emotional purging is usually traced back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BC).
Psychological experiments, however, have shown that unleashing your anger does not cause that anger to go away. In fact, actually has a tendency to make people even more angry than they were originally. Furthermore, while Aristotle did use the Greek word κάθαρσις (kátharsis) in his Poetics, he certainly didn’t use that word to mean what many people today think he meant by it.
An overview of the popular beliefs about catharsis and purging emotion
The word catharsis is popularly understood to refer to a situation in which someone releases their negative emotions—especially anger—and is thereby “purged” of them. This idea that destructive urges and emotions must be released in order to make them go away is widespread in twenty-first-century western culture.
For instance, releasing your anger is often billed as a “therapeutic.” You can buy so-called “stress dolls,” which often look like miniature people or animals that can be squeezed, thrown, or tortured in various other ways. Often these stress dolls have features such as eyes that pop out of their heads when squeezed. These toys are often said to help people cope with their stress or anger.
There are even places known as “rage rooms” where you go to engage in what is apparently known as “destructo-therapy,” which is often claimed to help people relieve stress and anger by destroying things. Come Break Stuff, a rage room based on Baltimore, Maryland, advertises in their FAQ that the items people are allowed to break “vary depending on inventory,” but often include “bottles, mugs, plates, glassware, picture frames, knickknacks, clay pigeons, etc.”
Other rage rooms apparently offer even larger, more expensive things to destroy. Sin City Smash, a rage room based in Las Vegas, advertises in their own FAQ:
“You can destroy electronic waste such as computer monitors, CPU towers, laptops, keyboards, printers, fax machines, TVs and any other electronics you can think of. Kitchen items like plates, bowls, bottles, cups, etc. Some rage rooms offer car smashing as well! Anything you can think of will most likely be breakable in an anger room.”
Smashing stuff to get rid of anger is what most people today think of as “cathartic.” As I shall show in a moment, though, not only are such activities not useful for coping with anger issues, but they are also very far away from what Aristotle was thinking of when he used the word “catharsis.”
ABOVE: Photograph from the website of Sin City Smash, a Las Vegas-based company, of smashed computer parts and other objects scattered all over the floor in one of their so-called “rage rooms”
Perhaps the most bizarre yet noteworthy example of this idea that negative emotions and destructive urges can be “purged” in popular culture is the 2013 American horror film The Purge. The premise of the film is that, in effort to reduce crime and unemployment, the government passes a decree saying that, for one night each year, all crimes, including murder, rape, arson, and theft, are legal. Apparently, the idea behind this decree is that people just need to get the pent-up urge to commit crimes out of their system.
The film (which I will admit I haven’t seen) portrays the annual “purge” as spectacularly effective, claiming that, as a result of the purge, the United States has become almost totally free of all crime and unemployment. This is, however, objectively not how crime works.
People aren’t driven to commit crimes by a pent-up urge that can be eliminated by satisfying it once a year. People who commit crimes usually commit them in the moment, either without thinking about the law or with the assumption that the law won’t affect them because they’ll easily be able to avoid law enforcement.
Legalizing crime for one night each year wouldn’t affect these people’s behavior because, quite simply, they aren’t thinking ahead when they commit the crime and the thought of waiting until the night when they’re allowed to commit crimes wouldn’t occur to them.
ABOVE: Theatrical release poster for the 2013 American horror film The Purge
Why “catharsis” as most people today think of it is actually bad
Contrary to what everything in popular culture seems to be telling us, psychological studies have actually repeatedly found that when someone releases their anger, it actually just makes the person more angry—even if the release is not directed directly towards another human being.
The psychologists Scott O. Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio, and Barry L. Bayerstein write on pages 149–150 of their book 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior, which was published in 2010 by Wiley-Blackwell:
“These shenanigans aside, research suggests that the catharsis hypothesis is false. For more than 40 years, studies have revealed that encouraging the expression of anger directly toward another person or indirectly (such as toward an object) actually turns up the heat on aggression (Bushman, Baumeister, & Stack, 1999; Lewis & Bucher, 1992; Littrell, 1998; Tavris, 1988). In one of the earliest studies, people who pounded nails after someone insulted them were more, rather than less, critical of that person (Hornberger, 1959). Moreover, playing aggressive sports such as football, which are presumed to promote catharsis, results in increases in aggression (Patterson, 1974), and playing violent videogames like Manhunt, in which bloody assassinations are rated on a 5-point scale, is associated with increased aggression in the laboratory and everyday life (Anderson & Bushman, 2002; Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley, 2007).”
“So getting angry doesn’t ‘let off steam’: It merely fans the flames of our anger. Research suggests that expressing anger is helpful only when it’s accompanied by constructive problem-solving designed to address the source of the anger (Littrell, 1998). So, if we’re upset at our partner for repeatedly showing up late for dates, yelling at him or her is unlikely to make us feel better, let alone improve the situation. But calmly and assertively expressing one’s resentment (‘I realize you probably aren’t doing this on purpose, but when you show up late it hurts my feelings’) can often go a long way toward resolving conflict.”
In other words, if you want to resolve your anger, the way to do it is not by releasing your anger towards someone else or towards an inanimate object, but rather by working with others to resolve the problem that is causing your anger in a peaceful and civil manner.
The authors of the book note that the reason why so many people wrongly believe that releasing their anger can help them calm down may be because anger naturally tends to go away after some time. People have a natural tendency to automatically assume that whatever happened before something else happened must have been the cause of that thing.
Thus, if someone vents their rage and then feels calm afterwards, they have a tendency to assume that it was them venting their rage that caused them to feel calm, but, in reality, they would have felt calm by then anyways even if they hadn’t vented their anger at all.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a first-century AD Roman mosaic from Pompeii depicting a famous scene from Book One of the Iliad in which Achilles tries to draw his sword in anger to kill Agamemnon, but Athena stops him by grabbing him by the hair
Aristotle and catharsis
The idea that releasing negative emotions such as anger can purge someone of those emotions is widely misattributed to the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Even Lilienfield, Lynn, Ruscio, and Bayerstein attribute the idea that releasing one’s anger can cause relief to Aristotle in their book. On page 147, they write:
“This belief [i.e. the belief that releasing one’s anger can make one feel more calm] dates back to more than 2,000 years ago, when Greek philosopher Aristotle, in his classic Poetics, observed that viewing tragic plays provides the opportunity for catharsis (derived from the Greek word “katharsis”)—a purging of anger and other negative emotions that provides a satisfying cleansing experience.”
Lilienfield, Lynn, Ruscio, and Bayerstein are professional psychologists who are well versed in the peer-reviewed psychological literature, so they’re probably right that releasing your anger isn’t an effective way of dealing with problems. I can tell you for a fact, though, that they are absolutely dead wrong in their interpretation of Aristotle.
This isn’t entirely their fault, since, obviously, Aristotelian philosophy is well outside their area of expertise and Aristotle is widely credited with this idea in popular writings. Nonetheless, they really should have read Aristotle’s original treatise and the scholarly literature on the subject a bit more carefully because they’ve managed to really mangle his philosophy here almost beyond recognition.
First of all, Aristotle never even mentions anger in connection to catharsis. Aristotle says in his treatise Poetics that watching the performance of a tragedy accomplishes a κάθαρσις (kátharsis) not of negative emotions generally, but rather of two specific negative emotions: pity and fear. Aristotle famously defines the purpose of tragedy in his Poetics VI as follows:
“…δι᾿ ἐλέου καὶ φόβου περαίνουσα τὴν τῶν τοιούτων παθημάτων κάθαρσιν.”
This means, in my own translation:
“…through pity and fear accomplishing the katharsis of these emotions.”
There is some dispute among scholars over how this passage is supposed to be interpreted. The confusion here lies in the precise meaning of the word κάθαρσις, which is a Greek word that can either mean “purgation” or “intellectual clarification.”
Traditionally, people have usually interpreted Aristotle as saying that watching a tragedy allows us to release our feelings of pity and fear and thus “purge” ourselves of these emotions. There is nothing in the text, though, to indicate that Aristotle meant this and it is far more likely that Aristotle actually meant to say that experiencing feelings of pity and fear while watching a tragedy clarifies those emotions for us by allowing us to experience them in a safe setting, thereby allowing us to better understand them, what they mean for us, and how we should deal with them.
Furthermore, it is important to emphasize that Aristotle was specifically talking about experiencing pity and fear in the very specific context of watching the performance of a tragedy. Even if we assume that he was suggesting that experiencing emotions like pity and fear while watching a tragedy could truly “purge” someone of those emotions, he was certainly was not suggesting the idea that engaging in acts of violence and aggression could purge anyone of violent emotions.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of Aristotle. Don’t blame Aristotle for The Purge.
Why “catharsis” as most people think of it is bad
The funny thing is that Aristotle would actually almost certainly agree with modern psychologists that unleashing your anger on the world is not a productive way of getting rid of anger. Indeed, Aristotle’s view of how to attain virtue and temperance is actually remarkably psychologically correct. In his Nikomacheian Ethics 2.4, Artistotle writes, as translated by J. A. K. Thomson:
“For the acquisition of virtues, on the other hand, knowledge has little or no force; but the other requirements are not of supreme importance, granted that it is from the repeated performance of just and temperate acts that we acquire virtues. Acts, to be sure, are called just and temperate when they are such as a just and wise man would do; but what makes the agent just as temperate is not merely the fact that he does such things, but the fact that he does them in the way that just and temperate men do. It is therefore right to say that a man becomes just by the performance of just, and temperate by the performance of temperate, acts; nor is there the smallest likelihood of any man’s becoming good by not doing them.”
The American historian Will Durant (lived 1885 – 1981) famously summarized Aristotle’s philosophy of how to attain virtue in his book The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers with this pithy maxim: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” (Durant’s quote summarizing Aristotle is, unfortunately, often misattributed to Aristotle himself on the internet, as I talk about in this article I wrote in July 2019.)
The whole idea of “catharsis” as most people today think of it goes totally against everything Aristotle believed. According to Aristotle, if a person wants to become calm, the person must do it by practicing the habit of being calm. Releasing one’s anger in a violent or aggressive manner will just make someone even more angry and prevent them from developing a habit of calmness.
Aristotle would be absolutely horrified by the notion expressed in modern films such as The Purge that engaging in crimes and acts of violence could possibly “purge” someone of the urge to engage in such activities. Aristotle would instead rightly argue that committing crimes will, at best, not help a person to obey the law in the future and, at worst, only lead that person to want to commit more crimes. He would say that the best way to avoid an urge to commit crimes is by making a habit of not committing crimes and of instead behaving justly and morally.
To be clear, Aristotle did have some ideas that were genuinely bad. For instance, as I mention in this article from February 2020, he espoused views that can only be described as racially deterministic. Likewise, as I discuss in this article from June 2019, he also held some views towards women that are, at best, deeply patronizing. Nonetheless, Aristotle was absolutely right about the fact that you don’t develop temperance by engaging in acts of rage and aggression.
ABOVE: Detail of Plato (left) and Aristotle (right) from the fresco The School of Athens, painted between 1509 and 1511 by the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael (For more information about the fresco, you can read this article I wrote about it in March 2019.)
Muy bueno. Certero, bien documentado y apoyado en uno de mis héroes, Aristóteles.
Adelante!