Alexithymia - a start

On different ways of saying feelings

“Alexithymia” designates an inability to name one’s own emotions.

A - without

Lexis - words

Thymos - heart/spirit/feelings.

It’s supposed to indicate a trait or phenomenon where people have dampened or disconnected emotional responses, and/or an inability to name the emotions they do experience. Anecdotally, though, it has expanded to cover any situation in which neurodivergent people have trouble feeling or naming their feelings. This means that people who are deeply concerned with finding the precise word for an emotion, and people who are dazzled by the array of word choices for emotions, and people who have trauma around naming their emotions, are all grouped under the same umbrella.

I’d like to suggest that we should have an entire Lexithymicon - a book of words about emotions - both in the sense that I want to talk more about the words we use for feelings, and also in the sense that we should have more words for how people apply words for feelings.

To that end I propose hyperlexithymia (many words for emotions, over-and-above words for emotions) and ortholexithymia (the right, straight, correct words for emotions).

But first, I want to start with the roots of these words - lexis and thymos.

Lexis is Greek for word, saying, speech - but it’s more than that. Etymonline has the whole set of connections:

[leg-] is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Greek legein "to say, tell, speak, declare; to count," originally, in Homer, "to pick out, select, collect, enumerate;" lexis "speech, diction;" logos "word, speech, thought, account;" Latin legere "to gather, choose, pluck; read," lignum "wood, firewood," literally "that which is gathered," legare "to depute, commission, charge," lex "law" (perhaps "collection of rules"); Albanian mb-ledh "to collect, harvest;" Gothic lisan "to collect, harvest," Lithuanian lesti "to pick, eat picking;" Hittite less-zi "to pick, gather.”

So this indicates that this isn’t just a matter of words, it’s a matter of systems. The implication is that if you can’t give it a word and say it, you can’t pick it out, gather it up, use it to keep yourself warm and fed. This connection between naming and security will become relevant later.

Thymos is much more complicated. It’s meant here to indicate “emotion” or “feeling” - but there’s no clear Greek root for this concept that I can find. “Emotion” is Latin and just means literally to be moved - to be stirred or pushed. “Feeling” is through Old English and German, and is primarily about having a tactile sensation or perception, and then to have an emotional reaction. From Greek roots, most discussion of emotion revolves around the root pathos, which means “suffering.” It’s the root of both “empathy” and “pathology.” In just a cursory look, it appears that the sense of “feeling” develops from the idea of “sympathy” as fellow-feeling - kind of like “compassion” means “feeling with” someone but is more literally suffering-with.

But as “alexithymia” explicitly encompasses positive and negative emotions, it would be a problem to direct it towards suffering. So thymos - which is a much rarer suffix, etymologically. Etymonline only has the root as part of the explanation for “enthymeme” - “from enthymesthai "to think, consider," literally "to keep in mind, take to heart," from en "in" (see en- (2)) + thymos "spirit, courage, anger, sense" (from PIE root *dheu- (1) "dust, vapor, smoke").” So thymos has the same sense as “inspiration” in connecting spirit, breath, smoke, and emotion.

Classical Greek apparently takes this much further. I’m going to have to dive into this a little more later, but the Oxford Classical Dictionary has an in-depth discussion of how thymos functions in Homer, Plato, and Aristotle. It’s basically a word for heart, spirit, motivation, and sometimes anger that emphasizes inwardness - “states of mind that are not expressed in behaviour can be said to be “hidden in the thymos.” As I read about it, it’s ironic how appropriately alexical the thymos is - it purposefully obscures further discussion of an emotion’s precise outlines. A hero speaks to their thymos in the same way that a neurodivergent tweets about their brain - in consultation with a closely-held but capricious and sometimes antagonistic inner force. “Vexed, he said to his great-hearted thymos” is common enough to be a Homeric formulation, used over and over.

I have to quote this conclusion at length, because it’s kind stunning in this context.

One thing that is characteristic of the passages considered so far is that the various uses of thymos—whether as a personified agent, as a reified container for thoughts and emotions, or in locutions which specify modes of thought and emotion—are rarely without a sense of the motivational strength of the impulse in question. The impulses that the thymos helps represent can be in harmony with the agent’s plans and goals but may also be in conflict with them. The thymos can be a container for one’s plans, or it can be the place where overwhelming emotions develop. It can be the restraining force that subjugates short-term emotional satisfaction to long-term goals, but more often it is a force that rational agents need to control. The thymos can be divided over what to do, but often the agent and the thymos are partners in deliberation. Interaction between the person and the thymos is represented in more than one way. The thymos represents a spectrum of functions, across which the other “psychic organs” also operate. But thymos is the dominant, prototypical, and most versatile example among them. In none of this is there any reason to question the coherence of the thymos as a concept or to conclude that this coherence detracts from that of the Homeric conception of the person as agent. It is not that thymos is sometimes affective or irrational in character and sometimes not; rather it reflects a view in which cognition and affectivity are intrinsically linked as aspects of a person’s inner life, moral character, and ways of being in the world. As an internal substance, space, entity, or agent associated with processes of cognition, affectivity, volition, and motivation, the thymos is not a scandalous miscellany of capacities that should be kept separate, but a concept that links “reason” and “passion,” mind and body, intentional and phenomenal in ways that implicitly recognize the unity of cognition and affectivity as functions of an organism whose mental functions are fundamentally and thoroughly embodied.

So the thymos apparently belies the need for a complete lexithymicon, and is actually consistent - at least in some ways - with the experience of alexithymia.

Why, then, is there this urge for putting words to feelings - specifically the urges I’d like to think about as hyperlexithymia and ortholexithymia? I’ll be back again, later, for that.