ABSTRACT
Katharsis is Greek for cleanse, purify or purge. Psychoanalysts use the term catharsis to suggest how ‘‘reliving’’ or recalling experiences that have prompted ANXIETY, but which have been repressed, can effect a cleansing discharge of tension. Some theorists have argued that playing and watching sports or exercising function as a catharsis, enabling participants and spectators to eliminate natural AGGRESSION that might otherwise build up and become destructive. Back in the 1920s, the psychiatrist A. A. Brill recommended attending a boxing show every month (quoted in Feshbach). The ethologist Konrad Lorenz regarded sport as a kind of safety
valve, a controlled mechanism for releasing innate behavioral tendencies, an INSTINCT (ethology is the study of behavior from a biological perspective). Because aggressive instincts were natural, nothing could be done about them. Human society had to devise ways to accommodate them or face continual VIOLENCE and devastation. Unlike other animals, humans had sufficient ingenuity to design measures that would allow the behavioral expression of aggressive instincts. Sport was the principal among them. It was a formalized, rule-bound order that licensed combative, violent, even warlike conduct but within a relatively secure framework. Competing in sports, either actually or vicariously (through watching others) allowed humans to rid themselves of aggressive instincts, usually without incurring, or doing, too much damage. The theory of sport-as-catharsis was based on a model of the
human being as a sophisticated animal, but an animal nevertheless, and so, to a large degree, at the mercy of instincts. While this may have intuitive appeal, research on the topic yielded mixed results. For
example, the work of, among others, L. Martin published in 1976, lent some support to the concept of catharsis, concluding that athletes were less aggressive after competition. On the other hand, a succession of research projects, including those of E. Ryan, in 1970, and D. Zillman et al., in 1972, revealed that athletes were more aggressive after COMPETITION, leading to the suspicion that REINFORCEMENT might occur. Even if the aggressive behaviors were reduced, there remains the likelihood that they might recur. As Seymour Feshbach has pointed out, ‘‘if the cathartic aggressive responses are indeed successful in reducing aggressive impulses, the responses will be reinforced.’’ While it did not explicitly acknowledge it, the 1987 study by
Robert Arms et al. implicitly recognized the role of reinforcement in shaping behavior, this time of spectators rather than competitors. It concluded that ‘‘the observation of aggression on the field of play leads to an increase in hostility on the part of spectators.’’ This has been termed vicarious catharsis.
