All 6 Uses
catharsis
in
Sophie's Choice
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- I won't dwell on this passage here, except to note my admiration therein not only for the terrible humiliations Gide had been able to absorb, but the brave honesty with which he seemed always determined to record them: the more catastrophic the humiliation or the disappointment, I noted, the more cleansing and luminous became Gide's account in his Journals—a catharsis in which the reader, too, could participate.†
p. 188.1catharsis = release of emotional tensions
- Although I can no longer remember for certain, it must have been the same sort of catharsis I was trying to attain in this last section on Leslie—following my meditation on Gide—which I include here.†
p. 188.1 *
- She was still in what appeared to be a raw condition of shock over Nathan's desertion of her (she said, not without a touch of grisly humor, that she had contemplated several times hurling herself from the window of the ratty Upper West Side hotel where she had languished those three days), but if grief over his parting had obviously eroded her spirit, it was this same grief, I sensed, that allowed her to open even wider the gates of her memory in a mighty cathartic cataract.†
p. 308.8cathartic = causing the release of emotional tensions
- For as she gazed toward the ceiling now through pupils gradually shrinking back to their normal focus, she was aware that Emmi had stood up and was regarding her with an expression resembling benignness, or at least a certain tolerant curiosity, as if there had been expelled from her mind her fury at Sophie for being both a Polack and a thief; the nursing seizure appeared to have been cathartic, allowing her enough in the way of an exercise of authority to satisfy the most frustrated SS dwarfing, after which she now assumed once again the plump round outlines of a little girl.†
p. 434.3
- I realize now how intensely discontented, rebellious and troubled I was at that age, but also how my writing had kept serious emotional distress safely at bay, in the sense that the novel I was working on served as a cathartic instrument through which I was able to discharge on paper many of my more vexing tensions and miseries.†
p. 479.1
- After a while we tried the Sermon on the Mount, but somehow it didn't work for me; the grand old Hebrew woe seemed more cathartic, so we went back to Job.†
p. 552.7
Definitions:
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(1)
(catharsis) a release of emotional tensions
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(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) Much more rarely, catharsis can reference purging the body by the use of a cathartic to stimulate evacuation of the bowels.