Catharsis: From Plato to the Modern Day

“They vainly purify themselves with blood when they are defiled with it, as if a man who had stepped into mud were to wash himself with mud.” Before it had anything to do with art, catharsis meant washing. You cleaned yourself before approaching the temple, because whatever you were carrying could not come in with you. Plato borrowed the word for philosophy itself, the soul working free of the body, and then turned around and said that poetry does the opposite. That it waters the passions instead of drying them out. His student used the same word to describe what tragedy does for us, and never bothered to explain what he meant. We are still washing. We meditate, we vent to a friend, we put on a movie we have seen forty times, we watch cheesy slashers. Some of us swear by it and some of us say we feel worse afterward, and we rarely ask what the difference is. Join us for a look at how rituals of purification have changed from the Greek temple to the group chat, what Freud and Brecht and the psychologists made of them, and what each of us turns to when we need to put something down. All are welcome and no reading is required!