What is alexithymia?
In brief, alexithymia is the inability to talk about feelings due to a lack of emotional awareness. Alexithymics are typically unable to identify, understand or describe their own emotions, and the construct of alexithymia refers to some of the chief manifestations of this deficit in emotional functioning. (You can read some more precise definitions here.) The term was coined from the Greek a- (prefix meaning “lack”), lexis (“word”) and thymos (“feelings”), and hence can be read literally as “a lack of words for feelings”. Note that alexithymia does not mean “a lack of words for feelings”. Its meaning is determined by its definition and is not constructed from the literal senses of its etymological roots. The term means the syndrome described in the literature and not simply an absence of emotion words.
In brief, alexithymia is the inability to talk about feelings due to a lack of emotional awareness. Alexithymics are typically unable to identify, understand or describe their own emotions, and the construct of alexithymia refers to some of the chief manifestations of this deficit in emotional functioning. (You can read some more precise definitions here.) The term was coined from the Greek a- (prefix meaning “lack”), lexis (“word”) and thymos (“feelings”), and hence can be read literally as “a lack of words for feelings”, but that is not what the term means. Its meaning is determined by its definition and is not constructed from the literal senses of its etymological roots. The term means the syndrome described in the literature and not simply an absence of emotion words.
