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This chapter begins by describing the mythological approach to film and religion by arguing that movies provide the collective myths that help a culture deal with its anxieties and hopes, usually by way of the cathartic drama of rewarded heroes and punished villains. Having established this theoretical groundwork, the chapter addresses specific pedagogical issues that relate to helping students not only to recognize the myths and values implicit within a film but also to understand how people appropriate them.

This chapter provides a brief introductory or refresher course intended to familiarize the reader with the basics of experimental research. Several sources of biasing influences are described, with each followed by the steps typically taken to control for their influence. Three traditional behavioral measures of laboratory aggression are reviewed, followed by four more recently developed laboratory measures. Self-reports of aggression, objective inventory measures, and projective techniques are described and evaluated. Attention is directed to the use of archival records as a source of data well suited to investigations of sport aggression. A concluding section traces the development of theory intended to account for aggressive behavior. Early instinctual explanations were displaced by the frustration–aggression hypothesis, aggressive cue theory, and social learning theory. The popular and persistent notion of catharsis is reviewed and found to be lacking empirical support.

If Aristotle's catharsis gets rid of something by allowing it moderate exercise, by tragedy it will get rid of an excessive disposition to grief, as well as pity and fear; and in comedy of an excessive disposition to contempt. Dispositions to fear, grief, and contempt do tend to be excessive. Until the Neoplatonists Porphyry and Iamblichus, there are only brief references to Aristotle's catharsis in Pythagoras and Pythagoreans, Philodemus, Plutarch, less clearly in the Stoics Diogenes of Babylon and Seneca. But among later Neoplatonists, Proclus denies theatre can be cathartic while Simplicius allows over-indulgence to be cathartic. Both compare a healing emetic. Olympiodorus associates catharsis through moderate exercise of emotion with Pythagoras, whereas Aristotle's catharsis is associated with his advice in Rhetoric to drive out one emotion by its opposite, and there are three other kinds of catharsis.

According to Seneca, the arts, including tragedy and music, can only produce first movements. So Aristotle's claim that tragedy and comedy produce catharsis by arousing emotion is wrong, as is Posidonius' belief in wordless music changing emotion without changing judgements. But, pace Seneca, there is a residue of cases of genuine emotion about the content of the play or about the melody, and a better defence of Stoicism in these cases would be that the relevant judgements are there. But when wordless music changes emotion, Posidonius prefers to say that the emotion is non-judgemental; Philodemus, his Epicurean contemporary, says that the emotion persists and one is merely distracted. The debate involved Pythagoreans, the Stoics Zeno and Diogenes of Babylon, and later Augustine.

But why does tragedy give pleasure to ‘people like ourselves’? A cruel or sadistic pleasure in the blinding of Oedipus is immediately distinguishable from what Aristotle called the oikeia hedone, ‘the proper pleasure’ of tragedy, and the same may be true — though less obviously true — in the case of the gloating, envious spectator. In the tragic theatre, suffering and death are perceived as matters for grief and fear, after which it seems that grief and fear become in their turn matters for enjoyment. ‘The pleasure of tragedy’ is an immediately uncomfortable phrase. Plato feared poets because it seemed to him that they told lies and whipped up irrational emotions. Aristotle's answer is that, in tragic poetry at least, emotion is not whipped up, but is discharged. His word, which has become so famous that it has stepped from Greek into English, is catharsis, ‘purification’ or ‘purgation’.

According to Aristotle, the pleasure of tragedy is the pleasure of vigorous excretion. Wish-fulfilment drama would seem to offer simultaneous gratification and catharsis (release of excess pressure). Of course if there were an unstoppable welling-up of fear in all of us which simply required expulsion from time to time, recourse to the tragic theatre would be explained: this theatre for that catharsis, the other theatre for the other. But Aristotle, despite his use of the alimentary analogy, is unlikely to have believed this. The person who did believe something of this sort is Sigmund Freud, who at least believed in quasi-physiological cathexes of psychic force — in psychic quanta — requiring periodic discharge. In The Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud distinguished his own practice from earlier investigations which had been confined to the field of consciousness: psychoanalysis, he observed, was able ‘to take its place as a natural science like any other’.

This chapter argues that Aristotle's theory of tragedy in the Poetics incorporates a model of ‘emotional understanding’: understanding filtered through the affective and evaluative responses embodied in emotions. The Poetics treats the defining experience of tragedy as involving a concentrated surge of pity and fear, but it ties these emotions to the audience's cognitive grasp of the unified patterns of human action represented in plot-structures. In the second half of the chapter it is maintained, partly with the help of Politics 8, that catharsis can best be interpreted as the psychological benefit arising from the conversion of painful into pleasurable emotions through an aesthetic experience of mimetic representation or expression. An appendix analyses and rejects two recent attempts to prove the catharsis clause in the Poetics an interpolation.

The Stoics regularly turned to the words of tragic characters to elucidate psychology, for it was thought that poetry was a vivid source of evidence about the unseen soul: Tragedy was the plot of the soul, an illustration of the process of cognition that produced emotion. Seneca’s plays regularly depict characters who are angry, frightened, or even in love, for passion was the Stoic explanation for the events traditionally considered tragic, and tragedy was the genre best suited to the world of mad emperors in which Seneca lived. Yet within both his plays and his philosophical essays, Seneca suggests that these vivid portraits of passionate souls serve not to make us passionate but instead help us to understand and to reject similar feelings. Aristotle’s notion of catharsis as a process of “clarification” shaped Seneca’s approach to tragic response.

This chapter considers Freud's claim, in The Interpretation of Dreams, to have discovered in Sophocles' tragedy the evocation of a universal Oedipus. Second are aspects of the myth of Oedipus — such as the story of the boy Chrysippus' rape by Oedipus's father Laius — that Freud downplayed in making his own emphasis. The third is the general proximity between tragedy and therapy, via the notion of catharsis, which had been recently reinterpreted in medical terms by Freud's own uncle by marriage, the classicist Jacob Bernays. Finally, there is the openness of all Greek myth and tragedy to reinterpretation in the light of changing cultural concerns.

This chapter considers the ignoring of hysteria in psychoanalytic writing after the early Studies in Hysteria (1895), co-written with Josef Breuer, and the recent centennial revival of interest in the disease as a transhistorical reality. It asks what it is about hysteria that renders it perpetually liable to seeming disappearance and subsequent reappearance. The chapter also examines how the proto-psychoanalytic ‘cathartic’ cure, which is first outlined in the Studies, is not necessarily as dramatically final as the adjective suggests. The patient ‘Anna O’ called it a ‘talking cure’, but also called it her ‘chimney-sweeping’, which suggests a mundane task that will always return.

Since fantasy usually centers upon power struggles and heroism, the protagonist is placed in a dire situation that can’t be solved in ordinary, real-life ways; therefore, such quandaries require protagonists who have extraordinary courage, willingness to take enormous risks, and/or magical powers. A six-step pattern of climax construction covers a choice between two terrible options, a sacrificial decision from the hero, an action that defies the villain, a dark moment of apparent defeat, a reversal, and the delivery of poetic justice according to what the hero and villain each deserve. Such a design has been used in storytelling since antiquity, yet this archetypal pattern remains universal because it’s emotionally and psychologically cathartic for readers.

This chapter discusses the magnitude of media violence effects, the idea of media violence providing catharsis (venting) for aggression, and a host of public policy questions. It shows, for example, that the harmful effects of violent video games are at least as large as many other known risk factors, such having abusive parents. Furthermore, video game violence is important because almost all children are exposed to this risk factor. The vast array of media violence studies over the last 50 years strongly disproves the catharsis idea that (unfortunately) remains so popular in modern culture. This is the idea that using violent media allows a person to vent their pent up aggressive inclinations, thereby reducing real aggressive behavior. Although this idea is appealing, it is wrong. The chapter concludes with descriptions of a wide array of public policy options that various concerned parents, legislators, and policy makers in a number of countries have proposed to address the harmful effects of violent video games.

This chapter focuses on book 8 of Aristotle's Politics and its discussion of mousike in education or paideia. It argues that in this context we should understand the term in the strict sense of music without words. Aristotle is concerned not so much with poetry and its place in society, but with the natural powers of music — of tunes, harmoniai, and rhythms — and how they affect ordinary people. According to this argument music is a leisure activity providing relaxation from labour and freedom from care, not a means of communicating deeper truths and values. Similarly, catharsis should be understood as a harmless release of the emotions (however that worked) rather than as an intellectual refinement which educated audiences in the proper use of the emotions.

Horror stories, in fiction and especially film, express the content of hypochondria that medicine excludes or denies: the abjectness of the damaged, diseased, dead, and decaying body. The genre of horror allows expression of this unruly aspect of embodiment. Centered on a reading of David Cronenberg's film The Fly as a kind of illness narrative, the chapter suggest that hypochondria is to medicine as horror is to tragedy-and as postmodern horror, in its refusal of catharsis or closure, is to the clinical decorum of modern medicine.

This chapter focuses on two elements in Lacan's reading of Antigone, two features, which are also two relations. One of these takes place on the stage, within the action of the play; the other takes place between this action and the audience who come to witness its unfolding. Within the play, it is a question of Antigone's relation to her brother, and the strange desire or fate, the compulsion or responsibility, that binds her to her brother — more precisely (since there are two), to that brother who is dead but not yet buried, that singular and irreplaceable brother towards whom Antigone alone is able, or willing, or compelled to act. The second feature is located in the relation between the action of the play and the audience that bears witness to that action. If Antigone is not only the heroine, but the heroine for us, if it is she who most of all attracts our attention and rouses our emotions, if we are drawn toward her in a kind of horrified captivation that both attracts and repels, moving us forward in pity even as we recoil in fear, then she is the principal focus of what Aristotle calls catharsis, that obscure but crucial experience of “emotion” which is definitive of tragedy as such.

This chapter illustrates the ethics of catharsis by means of anthropological and cultural analysis. It begins with some anthropological examples of how catharsis is linked to the process of narration. It reveals that the creative repetition of narrative is ethically imperative because it provides a clearer view to review insufferable pain and unbearable loss.

The psychology of repentance has dominated the attention of both Jewish theologians and western philosophers at the expense of the epistemology of repentance. This chapter is an attempt to rectify this lacuna. In an attempt to elucidate a somewhat obscure Talmudic debate about confession with the tools of current analytic epistemology, the cathartic value of repentance is thrown into sharp relief. The results reached here naturally generalize to many theological traditions within Christianity and Islam which similarly recognize the cathartic role of repentance.

This chapter concerns playwriting and dramatic theory after Descartes. It demonstrates how the much-discussed problem of dramatic catharsis originates in an incommensurability produced by Cartesianism, since the universal experience of pity and fear theorized by Aristotle cannot be reconciled with an audience of individualized subjects. Pierre Corneille responded to this incommensurability in Nicomède, whose script is analyzed alongside two of its performances: at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1651, and at the Louvre in 1658. Corneille reconfigured tragedy in order to foreground wonder, the precise emotion that Descartes located at the center of his emotional physics and moral philosophy. These Cartesian innovations, theorized in Corneille's copious theoretical writings, were in turn mimicked in English theater and dramatic theory of the period, especially that of John Dryden, whose essays "Of Dramatick Poesy" and "Conquest of Granada" are discussed.