Is it a disorder, a condition, a syndrome, an illness, a personality trait, a thinking style, or a neurotic defence?
Alexithymia is more complex than a singular property, quality or characteristic. Instead, it refers a bundle of concurrent characteristics. In the psychiatric sense, alexithymia is a clinical syndrome, not in the sense of a disease or illness, but “a characteristic combination of opinions, emotions, behaviour, etc.” (Oxford Concise Dictionary, 9th edn.). Alexithymia is indicative of a dysfunction in the cognitive processing of emotion, and for convenience the term is often used to refer to this underlying psychological problem, though such usage deviates from the accepted technical meaning. It is controversial to describe the dysfunction as a disorder, because it has not yet been offically defined as such by the psychiatric profession and is not listed in the DSM-IV or the ICD-10. The term condition is quite vague, however, and is acceptable in most contexts. Most of the recent research literature in psychology describes alexithymia as a personality trait. This means it is a persistent
