Lev Vygotsky's The Psychology of Art

"a work of art ... always includes an affective contradiction, causes conflicting feelings, and leads to the short-circuiting and destruction of these emotions. This is the true effect of a work of art" (521).

This is CATHARSIS ...
... be it:

• Aristotle's "purification of such affairs by means of pity and fear”
• Lessings' "transformation of passions into virtues"
• Müller's "transition from displeasure to pleasure"
• Bernays’ "healing and purification in the medical sense"
• Zeller’s "catharsis appeases affect"
• or Vygotsky's own "aesthetic reaction, according to which painful and unpleasant affects are discharged and transformed into their opposites"

 

"Aesthetic reaction as such is nothing but catharsis,
​that is, a complex transformation of feelings"
                                                        --Vygotsky, 522. 

Catharsis takes place by "contradiction which inheres in the structure of any work of art" (522), specifically, by an antagonism between the material and form of a work of art ...
   ... for example, when something horrific is expressed through beautiful prose, or incredibly joyful through somber tones.

"The law of aesthetic response is the same for a fable as for a tragedy: it comprises an affect that develops in two opposite directions but reaches annihilation at its point of termination" (522).

Rhythm is one of catharsis' formal elements, it "is capable of generating the affects represented by it" (522)--that is, it both expresses and causes the emotion that is then discharged and transformed into its opposite.

"A work of art always contains an intimate conflict
between its content and its form,
and the artist achieves his effect by means of the form,
​which destroys the content"
                                             --Vygotsky, 523.

Vygotsky sums up his insights on art as seated in catharsis: "We can say that the basic aesthetic response consists of affect caused by art, affect experienced by us as if it were real, but which finds its release in the activity of imagination provoked by a work of art" (523).  Hence, art's power is incredibly important as it is potent in the destruction of nervous energy. 

This is a very biologically grounded process and import.  He describes it as a "central release" that "delays and inhibits the external motor aspect of affect"  and that this delay heightens a tension in the "motor expression of emotions," which culminates in an "explosive discharge of nervous energy" (523)--yet, first, it is a biological process that melds the imaginative and bodily, the psychic and physical: "we think we are experiencing only illusory feelings. Art is based upon the union of feeling and imagination" (523)--and, yet, secondly, this biological import has tremendous socio-political import: "Without new art there can be no new man. The possibilities of the future, for art as well as for life, are inscrutable and unpredictable" (523).