Catharsis

Catharsis, from the Ancient Greek term for purification or cleansing, refers to the purging of emotions or thoughts by way of expressing them, with the desired result being a state of emotional renewal and restoration. In dramaturgy the term describes the arousal of negative emotion in an audience that is subsequently expelled, leaving the audience feeling happier, while in psychology the concept is most associated with Freudian psychoanalysis, where it refers to bringing a buried trauma, the presumed cause of a neurosis, into conscious awareness and releasing it, thereby increasing happiness. The first recorded use of the term in something like its psychological sense was by Aristotle in the Politics and the Poetics, where he compared the effect of music and tragedy on the mind of a spectator to the effect of physical catharsis on the body.