Alexithymia Flashcards
What is Alexithymia?
Not a mental disorder but a personality trait characterized by thesubclinical inability to identify and describe emotions in the self, this ability varies along a scale of severity
Places affected individuals at risk for other medical and psychiatric disorders while reducing the likelihood they will respond to conventional treatments for the other conditions
Also is a symptom of a number of psychiatric conditions
What are some characteristics of alexithymia?
Marked dysfunction in emotional awareness, social attachment, and interpersonal relating
Difficulty in distinguishing and appreciating the emotions of others - unempathicand ineffective emotional responding
Logical realistic dreams
- difficulty identifying feelings and distinguishing between feelings and the bodily sensations of emotional arousal
- difficulty describing feelings to other people
- constricted imaginal processes, as evidenced by a scarcity of fantasies
- a stimulus-bound, externally oriented cognitive style
When does alexithymia occur?
Alexithymia occurs in approximately 10% of the population and can occur with a number of psychiatric conditions
Common overlap with ASD, PTSD, clinical depression, ED,
What causes alexithymia?
Potential intrahemispheric communication issue ie corpus callosum dysfunction - emotional information in right hemisphere not transferred to language centres in the left
Also genetic links
What is ‘disaffectation’?
Psychoanalytic description of alexithymia by Joyce McDougall
In the past, patient experienced overwhelming emotion that threatened to attack their sense of integrity and identity, to which they applied psychological defenses to pulverize and eject all emotional representations from consciousness
By definition, infants are alexithymic - proposal that is alexithymia is an infant arrested structure, developed by the lack of parental emotional reactivity to the child leading to the child’s inability to identify the emotions in itself
