ABSTRACT
The author’s patient receives a telephone call from her mother after several weeks of silence—a pattern that has characterized the communication in her family for generations. This breach in communicative connection with her mother, along with her father’s use and abuse of words, had left the patient without meaningful language to frame her emotional states. Chapter Ten, no words to say it, explores the nature of what the author calls “dyslexithymia”—an impairment in the ability to make use of language and its nuances to capture the essence of, extract meaning from, and/or make emotional connection with the words assigned to one’s experiences. Citing research that suggests such a state may be a precursor to alexithymia, the chapter shows how this difficulty in connecting meaning with language harkens back to the earliest experiences, leaving people with perseverant personalities without words to describe their experiences, struggling to identify what reflects their own inner states and what reflects the psychic states of others, and susceptible to the ‘food thoughts’ that flood their minds to fill the void.
