Alexithymia is a difficulty recognizing emotions, and is sometimes seen along with depression, autism, or brain injury, among other conditions.
Alexithymia is a difficulty recognizing emotions, and is sometimes seen along with depression, autism, or brain injury, among other conditions.
Not quite… alexithymia is being unable to put words to feelings. It’s in the word… a- is not, lex- is words, thymia is feeling. Lacking words for emotions is not the same as not feeling the emotions.
Alexithymia is a common experience, but especially common when other communication barriers exist.
Shows that those psych-whatever-ists knew drat about the (ancient) greek language, because ‘word’ would be ‘logos’ and ‘alexi’ is actually a greek surname of ancient decent, that would mean ‘defender’. The ancient greeks would never have named the condition that way! My impression is that various Freudians and Anti-Freudians converged on the term in the early-mid-20th century as a means to make themselves sound smarter than any of them really were.
Source: As someone named Alexander, I just finally felt vaguely offended enough by the term to start digging a little deeper:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7005782/
And also, nothing about the condition as described by modern sources ever made any sense to me - which after reading the article I linked, wasn’t even a surprise to me anymore. Sorry, rant over.
TL,DR: It’s another piece of etymologic fallout from a historic shitslinging match between researchers and practitioners, but one that didn’t get resolved conclusively. Because brains …
It’s from lexis, for speaking, and thumos for heart.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/alexithymia