Erroneous definitions
These definitions represent misunderstandings by people outside the field. Be careful you don't make the same mistakes.
Alexithymia as a communication disorder
In Mapping the Mind, a remarkably well illustrated and accessible popular book on cognitive neuropsychology, Rita Carter confuses alexithymia with the inability to express emotions that are fully perceived and understood. This phenomenon is seen in some stroke victims and others who have lost emotional control over the motor functions of the face (aprosopothymia) or voice (aprosodia). They know what they feel, but they just can't express it naturally.
It is quite common for people to be able to feel emotion but to be quite unable to express it. These people, whose condition is known as alexithymia, are in a different situation to those like Elliott [a patient of Antonio Damasio, described in Descartes' Error, 1994 ], who cannot express emotion because they do not feel it to start with. The inability to express felt emotion probably arises when there is some disruption in the neural connections between the cortical (conscious) emotional processing areas and the brain regions that control facial expression, speech and the other physical means by which emotions are displayed.
Alexithymia strips those who have it of an important social tool — the ability to convey, swiftly and economically, how they feel. It is an unfortunate affliction for anyone, and can be disastrous in those who seek to influence people on a large scale.
Mapping the Mind, p.132
This confusion with the inability to express the fully recognized emotion is quite widespread. For example,
This need is also evident in the occurrence of alexithymia, a relatively widespread communication disorder. The patient presents with difficulty expressing his emotions in words.
http://home.attbi.com/~lady.socrates/whatis.html
so-called "alexithymia" (the inability to speak about feelings)
Gillberg, 1992
This confusion seems to arise from a literal etymological reading of alexithymia as "the lack of words for feelings". That is not what the term means and it is quite different from the true definition, as evident in the dictionary entries.
Alexithymia as psychopathy
The potentially most damaging misconception so far is the conflation of alexithymia with psychopathy. This mistake has regrettably reached a very wide audience: it featured in episode 24 of the popular X-rated TV series The Sopranos. It is very, very wrong.
There's a psychological condition known as alexithymia, common in certain personalities. The individual craves almost ceaseless action, which enables them to avoid acknowledging the abhorrent things they do. Abhorrent? What certain personalities? Antisocial personalities.
WB points to an emotional defect shared by all criminals, he says, whether they're Italian-American from Jersey or cracker-American from East Jesus, Arkansas. It stems, he says, from a psychological condition called "alexithymia." Thought up in 1972, alexithymia means "the inability to express or verbalize one's emotions." Every crook worth his salt has it, says WB. None of them know their own feelings. It could be out of some childhood terror or maybe just the lack of parental training. I mean, most crooks didn't have Alan Alda as a dad.
An alexithymic has no internal life so he focuses all of his attention on external events. To avoid the emptiness of his own existence, he looks for constant high-grade stimulation. He needs one rush after another - beating a guy over the head, robbing a truck, gambling at the track, screwing a hooker. In other words, the gangster's life. He's got to keep moving, got to keep one step ahead of the Feds, got to keep coming up with new thrills, new scams.
Wernick Report 8, Feb 7th 2002, on HBO website
The writers of The Sopranos risk stigmatizing alexithymics with a sinister profile that is in complete contradiction to the truth. Technical words can be dangerous when deployed by those without the technical expertise to use them properly. The researchers for this TV programme clearly don't understand the concept they picked up.
Note, however, that some empirical studies have reported correlations between alexithymia and psychopathy. Such studies tend to ignore the clear distinction between the two groups, as discussed in some theoretical papers: psychopaths show a significant deficit in affective responses, whereas alexithymics exhibit affective responses but either do not notice them or cannot identify them. Alexithymics and psychopaths have some superficial abstract traits in common (including some factors in the self-report questionnaires) but they are very different in personality, behaviour and psychology.
Alexithymia as a desirable pathology
'Alexithymia' refers to that pathology which prevents the afflicted from expressing their 'feelings'.
[...] So I beg you, be a carrier of the dread disease Alexithymia. Sneeze your repulsion of indulgence when you see it. Cough your logic in the face of irrationality and counterfeit 'feelings'.
Prescription for America: An epidemic of alexithymia
Rowles's misunderstanding, on which he bases an entire web article, appears both as a slightly skewed definition (it isn't just a problem with expression) and in a ill-conceived proposal. He points to the massive public wallowing in grief that occurred with the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the events of Sept 11, and recommends that the public at large would benefit from being alexithymic. Rowles' message is misguided. The public might benefit from being level-headed, but they might not be so keen on the difficulty in negotiating relationships, the lack of emotional intuition, the propensity for psychosomatic disturbance and so on. Alexithymics are not to be envied. Rowles displays an ignorance of the cognitive value of human emotions in general and of the alexithymia literature in particular (despite his alleged PhD in clinical psychology!). He makes a valid point—in his usual polemical manner—about the public over-emoting due to mass media manipulation, but alexithymia is not a suitable solution.
And a nice gentle one to finish off:
Alexithymia is Greek for "no word for emotions." This is a mental disorder in which a person has extreme difficulty in verbally expressing feelings and fantasies. Alexithymia is thought to contribute to psychosomatic illness, alcoholism and drug addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, and sociopathic personality. And this difficulty is present to a great or lesser degree in many people who are healthy as well as ill. I think that most women consider it a pretty normal male condition…
http://www.jaycross.com/jayhoo/psychology.htm#rightmind
This isn't completely wide of the mark, but it is quite sloppy. Alexithymia is not strictly a "mental disorder" (though this is an excusable error); it doesn't "contribute" to post-traumatic stress disorder, because it is neither a cause nor a component of the PTSD syndrome; it is independent of "sociopathy", and it is not a "pretty normal male condition" because the stereotypical male is full-blooded and passionate, even if he is often inarticulate about describing his passions. The passage may well be tongue-in-cheek but it could mislead uninitiated readers.
So you see there are a lot of misleading ideas out there. Hopefully this page will help to counter some of the misinformation. You have been warned!
