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T. J. Scheff is a sociologist who immersed himself for nine years in psychotherapy both as patient and practitioner. Mainly, he participated in “Reevaluation Counselling” (RC), a form of therapy that emphasizes catharsis in the belief that “unresolved emotional distress gives rise to rigid or neurotic patterns of behavior and that catharsis dissipates this pattern.” He wrote this book to present a theory of catharsis, to show how it works in ritual and drama, and to argue that it is a necessary component of therapeutic change.
Scheff's conception of emotion and of emotional illness (or whatever it is that impels people to seek therapy) will seem rather limited to the psychoanalytically trained reader. Restricting himself to the four basic emotions as defined by RC (grief, fear, anger, and boredom), he defines them as “physical states of tension which can be spontaneously discharged by convulsive, involuntary, bodily processes.” He distinguishes between a state of emotional distress and its discharge, and devotes much of his book to elaborating the special therapeutic conditions he considers necessary for catharsis. Briefly, these conditions include a balance of “underdistancing,” the re-experiencing of a distressful emotion as though it were an actual past trauma, and “over-distancing,” a solely cognitive or mainly verbal recalling. In the ideal therapeutic catharsis, “the individual is both participant in and observer of his or her own distress,” balanced between “involvement in past distress, and present safety.” In this state, people can experience the involuntary somatic discharges of crying, shivering, and laughing appropriate to the basic emotions, followed by feelings of control, pleasure, and relief. Repeated catharsis can, Scheff believes, uncover the unconscious source of emotional distress and lead to improvement in attitude and behavior.
Since Scheff does not deal with configurations of repressed emotion associated with particular neuroses, it is unclear w