About the concept of catharsis in Aristotle and how it works using an example from the network. Found it on the Internet. Photo caption: "This photo won an award for best photography, and led the photographer to depression. Cheetahs were chasing a mother and her children. The mother could have easily escaped from the predators, but instead she allowed herself to be torn to pieces to allow her children to escape. On In the picture you can see her, she is looking at the children running to safety." Here it is not even the photo that arouses interest, but the caption, which is circulating word for word on the Internet. If it weren't for her, it would have been just a photo of an antelope frozen in horror with glassy eyes. But the caption instantly turns the glassy eyes into an object of fantasy: the gaze of a dying mother looking lovingly at her child. I call these stories catharsis, which is always with you, in the news feed, I mean. Before this, there was an almost similar story about the earthquake. The mother covered the newborn child with her body, she died, but the baby survived. And when the rescuers got the child out, they saw a phone with the words “I love you son” written on the screen. Catharsis, as Aristotle described it in his Poetics, is something like a trap, a narcissistic captivity into which the viewer falls, making himself the object of this gaze. An object that is present in fantasy, around which the story of our connection with a significant Other unfolds. Then, at the moment of highest tension, the affect breaks out, and together with tears of purification the subject is freed from the trap. It's funny that in the story of the earthquake there is another, in whose place the viewer puts himself. This is a child who received the message "I love you son." In the story of the antelope, it would be difficult for the viewer to identify with the surviving artiodactyls, so a photographer with depression appeared. The author has a brilliant instinct. In other words, a depressed photographer is a person who has fallen into the trap of narcissistic captivity and stayed there. His eyes are forever riveted on this object, and he cannot stop enjoying it. A subjective failure has occurred. And precisely because he remained trapped, the viewer can ultimately calmly leave it, having first cried over the fate of the unfortunate people. Follow my publications in the TG channel Void_Laniakea