Catharsis

Catharsis is a form of emotional cleansing that the greek experienced when watching plays. The fact that someone else could suffer worse than them was a relief for them, and at the end of the play, they felt ecstasis (another word for catharsis), the word from which the modern word ecstasy comes from.

The term Catharsis has been adopted my modern psychotherapy to describe the act of giving expression to deep emotions often associated with events in the individuals past which have never before been adequately expressed.