[Alexithymia and psychological trauma--analysis of verbal expression of subject with post-traumatic stress disorder:...

The aim of this preliminary study is the analysis of the utterances of subjects suffering from Post-traumatic disorder. The study is based on the recent methods of discourse analysis developed in France by Ghiglione and Blanchet (1991, 1998). We have tried to know how victims of psychical trauma verbalize their different emotional reaction to the traumatic event. We expected to find discursive indicators characteristics of alexithymia when they speak about their emotion associated to traumatic event, that is to say an inhibition of the verbal expression of emotion, a factual, descriptive and objective discourse, a diminution of the personal engagement, difficulties to give explanations about the violent trauma. This study shows that the victims of psychical trauma don't present a lack of verbalization of their emotions but a dissociation in the expression of their emotions. The emotional words are more frequently associated to the symptoms than to the traumatic event that had been at the origin of the symptoms. This dissociation is similar to a particularity of alexithymia as it was described by Sifnéos (1996). The study also shows that the distribution of the discursive indicators in the different themes discussed by the subjects constitutes an interesting way of work needing then the application of experimental and comparative methods.