Alexithymia — from the Greek, literally 'no words for feelings' — enters the depth-psychology corpus primarily as a sequela of trauma and a structural impediment to self-regulation. Van der Kolk offers the most sustained treatment, positioning alexithymia as the outcome of chronic disconnection between interoceptive bodily signals and the cortical apparatus capable of naming them: the body registers affects that consciousness cannot articulate. Ogden and Levine converge on the somatic dimension, locating alexithymia within the spectrum of post-traumatic collapse, alongside dissociation and shutdown, and tracing its origins to the futility of emotional action patterns that have failed repeatedly to restore safety. A distinct but converging line of argument appears in addiction studies: Sönmez, Verdejo-Garcia, and Flores each situate alexithymia as a prevalent dysfunctional trait among substance-dependent populations, where impaired interoceptive awareness and difficulties identifying and describing emotional states are mutually reinforcing deficits that sustain craving and relapse. Barrett's constructionist framework provides an implicit counter-theory: alexithymia, on her account, is a poverty of emotion concepts rather than a failure of bodily signal, which reframes it as a developmental and cultural deficit in granularity rather than a traumatic dissociation. The term thus sits at the intersection of somatic, developmental, and neuroscientific perspectives, serving as a diagnostic node where body, brain, and relational history converge.
In the library
12 substantive passages
Her body felt the sadness that her mind couldn't register — she was leaving our Jung family, her closest living relatives. Psychiatrists call this phenomenon alexithymia — Greek for not having words for feelings.
Van der Kolk introduces alexithymia as the clinical name for the dissociation between bodily affect and conscious articulation, exemplified by traumatized individuals who cannot identify what their physical sensations mean.
van der Kolk, Bessel, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, 2014thesis
Being constantly assaulted by, but consciously cut off from, the origin of bodily sensations produces alexithymia: not being able to sense and communicate what is going on with you.
Van der Kolk identifies alexithymia as the direct neurological product of chronic disconnection from interoceptive signals, linking it explicitly to dissociation and shutdown as overlapping trauma sequelae.
van der Kolk, Bessel, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, 2014thesis
This is called an inability to verbally identify the meaning of physical sensations and muscle activation, alexithymia. This inability to recognize what is going on inside — to correctly identify sensations, emotions, and physical states — causes individuals to be out of touch with their needs.
Ogden defines alexithymia as the failure to translate somatic activation into meaningful emotional information, framing it as a core obstacle to self-care and adaptive action in traumatized individuals.
Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis
Traumatized people characteristically lose the capacity to draw upon emotions as guides for action. They might suffer from alexithymia, a disturbance in the ability to recognize and find words for emotions (Sifneos, 1973, 1996; Taylor, Bagby, & Parker, 1997).
Ogden anchors alexithymia within trauma phenomenology as a disturbance of emotional guidance, citing Sifneos's original coinage and situating it alongside flat affect, impulsivity, and uncontrolled emotional expression.
Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis
This shows up as symptoms of alexithymia (the inability to describe or elaborate feelings due to a deficiency in emotional awareness), depression and somatization.
Levine places alexithymia within the trajectory of chronic PTSD shutdown, describing it as the gravitational endpoint of oscillations between numbing and emotional flooding, co-occurring with depression and somatization.
Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010thesis
Alexithymia, which refers to the limited ability to recognize and describe emotions and reflects impairments in emotional awareness, is a prevalent dysfunctional trait in individuals with addiction.
Sörmez establishes alexithymia as a widespread feature of addicted populations, proposing that it represents an indirect marker of interoceptive deficits and contributes to altered appraisal of physiological cue-exposure responses.
Sönmez, Mehmet Bülent, Decreased interoceptive awareness in patients with substance use disorders, 2017thesis
IA was negatively correlated with difficulties in identifying feelings, but no significant correlations between IA and other features of alexithymia were found.
Sörmez reports empirical evidence that interoceptive awareness correlates specifically with the feeling-identification dimension of alexithymia in addicted individuals, suggesting the relationship is facet-specific rather than global.
Sönmez, Mehmet Bülent, Decreased interoceptive awareness in patients with substance use disorders, 2017supporting
Lane, R. D., Ahern, G. L., Schwartz, G. E., Kaszniak, A. W., 1997. Is alexithymia the emotional equivalent of blindsight? Biological Psychiatry 42, 834–844.
Verdejo-Garcia's bibliographic citation of Lane et al.'s formulation of alexithymia as 'emotional blindsight' situates the construct within the neurobiological literature on interoception and addiction.
Verdejo-Garcia, Antonio, The role of interoception in addiction: A critical review, 2012supporting
Affect responses, somatization of (alexithymia), 242–243
Flores indexes alexithymia explicitly as the somatization of affect responses within his treatment framework for addicted populations, signaling its structural place in his psychodynamic account.
Flores, Philip J, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997supporting
People who exhibit moderate emotional granularity might have dozens of emotion concepts rather than hundreds... perhaps not many more than the so-called basic emotions.
Barrett's account of low emotional granularity implies a constructionist analogue to alexithymia: when emotion concepts are sparse, the capacity to differentiate and name affective states is correspondingly impoverished.
Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017supporting
They are often unable to tell when they are tired, sick, hungry, anxious, or depressed... Such disturbances in self-care also lead individuals to fail to be aware, cautious, worried, or frightened enough to resist or avoid behavior that is injurious or damaging.
Flores describes the functional consequences of impaired affect recognition in addicted individuals — including failure at basic self-care and risk-avoidance — consistent with the alexithymic profile.
Flores, Philip J, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997supporting
Taylor... Interoception and drug addiction. Neuropharmacology, 76 Pt B, 342–350.
The bibliographic reference to Taylor situates alexithymia measurement within the interoception-addiction research cluster, functioning as scholarly scaffolding for the empirical claims in the Sörmez study.
Sönmez, Mehmet Bülent, Decreased interoceptive awareness in patients with substance use disorders, 2017aside