ABSTRACT
The assumption that other people's emotional responses are like our own is the basis of empathy and as such is basic to all human intercourse. The uncritical acceptance of this assumption, however, has
led us to the false expectation that all patients have available to them the affective functions necessary for the utilization of psychotherapy. This chapter examines some variations of affective function, affect forms, and those factors that make emotions available as signals to oneself. We discuss, in particular, a major disturbance in affective and symbolic function-alexithymia. Here we want to reconsider what various workers in the field have come up with in terms of theories or explanations of alexithymic phenomena that would give us some therapeutic openings. At the same time, these explorations pose views of the psychotherapeutic process that are timely to reconsider in the context of the other views presented in this book. But, first, a final brief review of the history and description of this phenomenon.
