Alexithymia is a theoretical construct concerning
the ability to contact our feelings
and the ability to describe them in words. It
is very useful in clinical experience and also
in empirical research for its operationalization
and applicability possibility. After more
than 40 years from its original definition,
with clinical observation of patients defined
“psychosomatics” according a classic definition,
alexithymia has become one of the most
investigated disease in the last decades. This
paper aims to explore etiopathogenetic hypotheses
and contemporaneous prospective
within which it is possible to understand the
relevance of the construct both in clinical experience
and in empirical research. Furthermore,
the paper examines alexithymia assessment
methods to provide a complete and
updated description of tools now available
for clinical research. We also wish to underline
the fundamental limit in a detailed study
on alexithymia: the absence of psychometric
tools to assess the disease in developmental
age. This limit is related to the difficulty of
building research tools able to understand
the developmental movement in emotional
processing capacity during childhood. However,
there are recent preliminary studies on
children/teens and preteens which pave the
way for research in this direction