Alexithymia: when words are missing

Alexithymia is the term used to refer to people with great difficulty or inability to express and name their emotions. The word comes from the Greek, meaning "absence of words for emotions". Within the alexithymic picture, poor affective traits, development of utilitarian relationships, absence of empathy, scarce creativity and imagination, operative thinking, that is, disconnected from subjectivity, desire and symbolic capacity, are also presented.

A Recent research , researchers from USP found that, contrary to what has been claimed for a long time, alexithymia has not been associated with an organic disease. This condition has been observed in clinically healthy people. Thus, the authors argue that it refers to a typification of what they call "personality of the current time", that is, it is a condition closely linked to characteristics of our time, such as "economic and social competition, impoverishment of oral and written language, rationalizing mentality and growing daily suffering".

Sometimes I distance myself (or try to distance myself) from "our time", in an exercise of estrangement from the familiar and really amazed Artificial intelligence, chat GPT, machines taking the place of people. The hyperstimulation present on the internet, the bombardment of news that arrives incessantly, the speed at which everything seems to happen, on social networks, which work in the key of image (always pierced, misleading) and exposure. Our increasingly limited ability to concentrate, intolerance for long texts, fragmented thinking, the increased speed of videos on YouTube or audios on WhatsApp – an application practically omnipresent in our lives. I think about how we transform the Smartphones in appendices, in how life is increasingly virtual, less flesh and blood. More mechanical, less human.

The term "alexithymia" is placed for me as a kind of translation – always impossible, flawed – of this discomfort that I have been feeling when I realize how we are living. Isn't it frightening that we have produced a condition in which we do not know how to recognize and express emotions, feelings? It seems to me truly terrifying, insofar as emotions, feelings, affections and language are the essence of what makes us human, they are the substance of our humanity.

I write from a comfortable chair, typing my text on a notebook, in an air-conditioned environment. I will publish this text with just one click, making it available to people thousands of miles away. None of this would be possible without technology. These are just a few examples, I could mention many others, such as advances in the field of health, which allow us to have a higher life expectancy and quality of life. I am not qualified to say much about the technologies themselves, about "artificial intelligence", but obviously I recognize that we get a lot out of them and that they represent an improvement in life in many ways.

It is not appropriate to demonize technology, but to always carefully observe its effects on the most diverse areas of human life, remembering that gains are usually accompanied by costs. In The malaise in culture , Freud addresses this ambiguity of scientific progress, saying, for example, that if there were no railroads, a mother would not need a telephone to talk to her child, because he would not have left. He then states:

It seems certain that we do not feel good in our present culture, but it is very difficult to know whether the men of earlier ages felt happier, and to what extent, and what part the cultural conditions had in it (p. 85, edition L&PM).

That said, I reserve the right to confess that I tend to look with some resistance when tools like chat GPT arrive, because I wonder about their developments, about their impact on our way of thinking, on our ability to create, to invent. What will we do with our thinking? Let's stop thinking and let the machines think? Do machines think? Do they have intelligence? What else are we going to delegate to machines?

Will there come a day when computers – I don't know how to name devices like that – will be able to identify and name a human's feelings? Honestly, I don't believe that. Machines don't feel. We humans are the ones capable of feeling, experiencing emotions and naming them. These are singular, non-transferable experiences, and at the same time, shareable precisely because of the existence of language.

This is how we bond with the other, sharing experiences, finding someone who feels what we feel, who understands what we feel. No wonder, one of the characteristics of alexithymia is utilitarian relationships, a detachment of affection. Consequently, loneliness, suffering. If, on the one hand, machines are learning from us and thus becoming almost unlimited repositories of our productions, on the other hand, it seems that we are progressively becoming machines as well, sadly dehumanized.

In a brief text from 1933, entitled "Experience and poverty" (in Magic and technique, art and politics: essays on literature and the history of culture , São Paulo: Brasiliense, 2012), Walter Benjamin talks about how we become poorer in communicable experiences:

An entirely new form of misery befell men with this monstrous development of technique (p. 124).

Poverty of experience: this is not to be understood as if men aspire to new experiences. No, they aspire to be free from all experience, they aspire to a world in which they can flaunt their poverty, both external and internal, so purely and so clearly that something decent can come out of it. Nor are they always ignorant or inexperienced. Often the opposite can be said: they have "devoured" everything, the "culture" and the "human being", and have become satiated and exhausted. No one is struck by Scheerbart's words more than they do: "You are all so tired—and all because you have not concentrated all your thoughts on a totally simple but absolutely grandiose plan."

If 90 years ago, Benjamin saw things like this, what would he say today, when we have a chat GPT? We are really exhausted from so much information and little experience, impoverished in our language and in our capacity for expression and symbolization. Alexithymia is evidence of the effects of the life we are leading. Thinking about the grandiose, about accelerating the processing of information even more, about inhabiting other planets, we are forgetting the simple.

It is necessary to rescue words, the power of the symbolic. Playing with words, taking them in their original meanings as well as giving them new meanings, transgressing grammar, semantics, syntax to say what we feel as humans and that is constantly challenging language. For this, I believe that it is necessary to learn from the best, the writers and poets; Follow a literary prescription . To do so, an analysis is used, in which she focuses on the words themselves, the signifiers that emerge and that, in another context, could go unnoticed. Words give contour and consistency to what is lived. We cannot do without them.

Note: I have made a very brief and concise presentation of the term "alexithymia" here to try to think about how it is placed as evidence of the effects of the lives we currently lead. For a deeper understanding of this construct, I refer the reader to the article cited at the beginning of the text:
• Caetano, A. and Rodrigues, A. (2023). Alexithymia and Psychosomatics: the Impoverishment of Language and the Processes of Falling Ill. Revista de la Educación Superior (RESU).

Below is an indication of another article on the subject:
• Rodrigues, A. L. et al. (2014). Critical reflections on the construct of alexithymia. Rev. SBPH, 17(1), pp. 140-157.