1 Geriatric Psychology and Cathartic Healing in Literature Rishikesh Kumar Singh Joint Secretary, ASLE-India Guest Faculty & Researcher, Delhi University, India Contact: 09873633301 Email: rishisengar2011@gmail.com rishisengar2004@rediffmail.com Abstract „Catharsis‟, perhaps, the most efficient non-medical term in literature mostly used for medicinal purposes and in psychotherapy. The Aristotelian notion of catharsis influenced all the critics, doctors and thinkers in different ways. In a particular and quite new branch of psychology, known as „Geriatric Psychology‟, catharsis has been used in healing the elderly people and to make them happy as usually at this age they feel ignored and thus they face a lot of mental digressions. In this paper I have tried to find out the relation between geriatric psychology and the implication of catharsis to it and their literary applications through the two major works of literature – a short story Old Love by Isaac Bashevis Singer and a novella The Bear Came over the Mountain by Alice Munro. Key Words: Geriatric Psychology, cathartic healing and cathartic exile. ___________________________________________________________________________ The term „Catharsis‟ has been much entertained by various literary critics, psychologists and medical practitioners since the time of Aristotle, the foremost literary doyen, who defined and perhaps coined this term as “purging of the spirit of morbid and base ideas or emotions by witnessing the playing out of such emotions or ideas on stage.” 1 Over the time, the term has undergone through different connotations in translation such as „cleansing‟, „purgation‟ or „purification‟ and so on. The emotional and cognitive aspects of catharsis ushered a way to its