Understanding alexithymia within a psychoanalytical framework

Abstract

The object of this paper is to provide a metapsychological definition of alexithymia as described in 1967 in terms of operational thinking and negative hallucination. This is a familiar and established concept in the fields of psychopathology, psychology, and of clinical and psychosomatic medicine. From a psychoanalytic and psychosomatic point of view, the term is conceptually close to P. Marty's "operative thinking", as described in 1963, even though we know they do not belong to the same epistemological field: on one hand Neuroscience, Psychiatry and the objectalization of the symptom at different levels, and on the other, as regards mechanical functioning, a psychoanalytic clinical approach within the dynamics of the relationship between transference and counter-transference. The present authors consider that Freudian metapsychology, as now complexified by Andrè Green, allows for a metapsychological approach to alexithymia insofar as it relates to Marty's operative thinking. Thus does Green's conceptualization of the mother's negative hallucination, of negative introjection, of a psychically 'dead (and insecure) mother', now provide us with the opportunity to describe, in metapsychological terms, the genesis of this particular mode of psychical functioning. Given the mother's negative hallucination produces a host structure as a background to negativity that will fit future object representations, we will assume that in the case of … future operational or alexithymic …?, this negative hallucination will pathologically and defensively involve the endo-psychic perception of affect.

Autobiographical Memory in Adolescent Girls with Anorexia Nervosa

“…Meanwhile, depression seems to be related to nonresponses, especially at negative cues, suggesting the hypothesis of an additional inhibitory effect played by mood disorders in AN adolescent subjects. Similarly, although alexithymia might play a role in altering AM (Pirlot & Corcos, 2012), and could contribute to the emotional dysregulation observed in ED, our findings showed that it cannot per se account for overgeneralization. From this point of view, our data are in accordance with literature on adult women with AN (Nandrino et al, 2006).…”

A development of Freudian metapsychology for schizophrenia

“…His speech continues to be very focused upon the current and the factual, with difficulties in providing associations of any relevance; his oneiric activity is very limited, and when dreams do appear they are often mere reproductions of waking experiences, with little process of elaboration. This is reminiscent of the operational‐life‐type functioning of the Paris School (Marty and De M'Uzan, ; Pirlot and Corcos, ), which certain authors have also described for other types of non‐neurotic cases such as borderline patients (Braier, ).…”

De l’inquiétante étrangeté à la dépersonnalisation. Quand l’affect pousse le moi vers les bords de l’‘autre de l’objet’, le sujet

“…Je comprends mieux comment cela arrive, je suis occupée à une tâche, ou suis "dans ma tête" et, soudainement, quelqu'un entre dans mon bureau, me parle ou alors, comme lorsque j'étais rentrée chez moi en pensant être seule, je dois, brutalement, m'adapter à un nouvel environnement alors que je ne suis pas prête à cela ». Tout au long de cette analyse en face à face, je percevais chez elle un mode opératoire ou alexithymique de pensée (Pirlot et Corcos, [37]). Elle cherchait des mots pour décrire ses émotions, celles-ci ne s'exprimant que sous forme de sensations.…”