Is Alexithymia a Disconnection Syndrome? A Neuropsychological Perspective

Abstract

Efforts to relate the syndrome of alexithymia to cerebral dysfunction have generally taken the form of comparing the literal, concretistic, nonimaginative and affect-impoverished cognitive and communicative style of alexithymic patients to similar types of behavior seen in individuals with right-hemisphere damage or commissural disconnection. It is argued that the formulation of a neuropsychological typology of psychiatric syndromes like alexithymia has much heuristic merit as long as appropriate theoretical and methodological caution is exercised in drawing inferences about patterns of cerebral organization in nonneurological populations.