Catharsis usually occurs after a tragedy or trauma.
You have to go to Greek, symbolically speaking, to be able to find the etymological origin of the word catharsis that concerns us now. It derives from the word "catharsis", which can be translated as "purge" or "purification."
Its original meaning referred to the procedure to purify or cleanse those individuals or objects that had some type of impurity.
The Cathars
It was precisely that Greek term that served as inspiration to give the name to a 10th century French religious group whose members called themselves Cathars, the "pure" ones: Catharism. The south of France was where that movement had the greatest growth and development, which was dissident from the Catholic Church and which, among other things, opted to affirm that creation was the fruit of a duality: Christ and Satan.
Likewise, the Cathars rejected the material world and advocated asceticism as a means of salvation. They had their peak in the 12th century, but the Catholic Church, given the advance they were experiencing, decided to ally with the French crown to put an end to them. In this way, they not only declared them heretics but also took measures to put an end to them violently.
In this last case, it must be said that starting in 1209 there was a real crusade against the Cathars, in which acts such as the siege of the citadel of Montsegur in 1244 were especially tragic. The result of this and other actions of A similar cut led to the flight of those who found themselves in the need to hide. And so it was that, little by little, Catharism began to become extinct in all the corners it had reached.
Catharsis can be understood as a liberation.
Catharsis as change
Currently, catharsis is used to name the change that a person experiences after experiencing a traumatic event or one that causes great exaltation. For example: "When I saw the car on fire, I had catharsis and cried for three days" , "Juana is going through a very complicated moment but she cannot express what she feels: I hope she can have catharsis and get rid of the anguish inside her" , " After the fight, I felt like a catharsis and I relaxed."
Catharsis is also the consequence that something tragic produces in the observer who experiences various emotions, such as terror or mercy. According to Aristotle , these types of experiences cause the observers of a tragedy to end up purifying their interior and freeing themselves from these passions.
Tragedy as a genre , in this sense, produces a catharsis and manages to heal the spectator since he projects the emotions on the characters that appear on stage. These characters are punished in the play and the observer can feel empathy without fear of experiencing the consequences of those same punishments.
The communication of emotions
Psychoanalysis makes a similar definition of the idea of catharsis, considering that the possibility of communicating a repressed emotion through therapy serves for the individual to achieve catharsis and free themselves from trauma .
In the field of biology , finally, catharsis consists of intentionally or spontaneously discarding certain substances that are harmful to the organism.