Alexithymia, Clinical Issues,Politics and Cri me1

Accessible online at: www.karger.com/journals/pps Alexithymia has been known concept now for more than a quarter of a century [1]. This construct was formulated as a result of clinical observations about affect deficits in patients suffering from a variety of psychosomatic conditions in Paris and in Boston in the 1960s. Alexithymia, a term I introduced for better or for worse in 1972, involves a marked difficulty to use appropriate language to express and describe feelings and to differentiate them from bodily sensations, a striking paucity of fantasies and a utilitarian way of thinking which Marty et al. [2] have called pensee operatoire. Here, I want to emphasize an important aspect of alexithymia which to my knowledge has hitherto been overlooked and ignored, namely its association with politics and crime. First, however, I would like to give a brief historical account of the ideas surrounding the construct of alexithymia. Following the original clinical observations already mentioned, two international conferences were held in London in 1972 and in Heidelberg in 1976, which established the importance of alexithymia for the investigation of affect deficit states. The London conference pointed to the need for studies about the measurement and biologi-