alexithymia
So this is definitely overdoing it, haha but I’ve always loved Psychology (my frustrated major tbh) and the last episode made me extremely interested in how Noriko’s and Katsuhira’s condition compared to the real deal.
I went looking into both, Congenital insensitivity to pain (inability to feel physical pain) and Alexithymia (inability to feel emotional pain), because people with congenital insensitivity to pain are able to feel emotions just fine.
And Alexithymia is so spot-on that it blew my mind. Granted, I’m not expecting them to outright say they have this condition, but I wanted to share the info just in case someone else is also interested in Psychology! :D
Alexithymia is a personality construct characterized by the sub-clinical inability to identify and describe emotions in the self: Problems identifying, describing, and working with one’s own feelings.
A common misconception about alexithymia is that affected individuals are totally unable to express emotions verbally and that they may even fail to acknowledge that they experience emotions. The distinguishing factor was their inability to elaborate beyond a few limited adjectives such as “happy” or “unhappy” when describing these feelings.
The core characteristics of alexithymia are marked dysfunction in emotional awareness, social attachment, and interpersonal relating.
Furthermore, individuals suffering from alexithymia also have difficulty in distinguishing and appreciating the emotions of others, which is thought to lead to un-empathic and ineffective emotional responding.
Typical deficiencies may include […] concrete, realistic, logical thinking, often to the exclusion of emotional responses to problems. Individuals suffering from alexithymia think in an operative way.
Questioning usually reveals that they are quite incapable of describing their feelings or appear confused by questions inquiring about specifics of feelings.
In general, these individuals lack imagination, intuition, empathy, and drive-fulfillment fantasy. Instead, they seem oriented toward things and even treat themselves as robots.
The core issue is that alexithymic have poorly differentiated emotions limiting their ability to distinguish and describe them to others. This contributes to the sense of emotional detachment from themselves and difficulty connecting with others.
It’s said that they lack imagination, which severely limits the content of their dreams. And according to this testimony by someone with the condition, “I do not have an imagination, no. When I dream, it is reflective of past events.”
See what I mean?? Completely spot-on!
Causes
- Interhemispheric transfer deficit, often caused by severe childhood abuse. (I’d say experiments involving physical wounds - and possibly even being deprived of any individuality - count here).
- Disturbance to the right hemisphere of the brain, which is largely responsible for processing emotions. (Completely possible that their constant attempts to connect the Kiznaiver’s emotions messed up that hemisphere of the brain).
That’s for the neurophysiological explanations. But there’s also a psychological one that fits Katsuhira’s case ridiculously well:
For McDougall, the disaffected individual had at some point “experienced overwhelming emotion that threatened to attack their sense of integrity and identity”, to which they applied psychological defenses to pulverize and eject all emotional representations from consciousness.
Plus, that “threatened to attack their sense of […] identity”. We have already seen how Noriko’s counting on the Noriko that “exists inside Katsuhira” to regain her sense of self. So it’s also entirely possible that by losing Noriko that day, Katsuhira lost a huge piece of himself.
Different Types
- “Primary alexithymia” which is an enduring psychological trait that does not alter over time.
- “Secondary alexithymia" which is state-dependent and disappears after the evoking stressful situation has changed.
tl; dr
If we play along for a second and apply all of the above to Katsuhira and Noriko as if they were real people, I get the feeling Noriko’s would be an “enduring psychological trait” produced by neurophysiological reasons (the Kiznaiver experiment messing up her capacity to process emotions), while Katsuhira’s would be a “state-dependent” one caused by trauma.
Young Katsuhira most likely had Congenital insensitivity to pain and perhaps even some lack of emotional-awareness, but not actual alexithymia. The other children however did appear to have it (or at least, they seemed to have it to a greater extent than Katsuhira).
After all, people with this condition can’t feel fear:
While the flashbacks showed that Katsuhira could:
If that is the case, perhaps that’s the difference Noriko talked about? That the experiments had already messed up the right hemisphere of the brain of most of the children, while Katsuhira’s was still relatively intact (perhaps because he joined the experiment at a later date?). It would explain why Noriko was convinced Katsuhira would be able to get his physical pain back, unlike the rest of them.
In which case, that traumatic event with Noriko would be that "stressful situation” and “overwhelming emotion” that caused Katsuhira to raise psychological defenses to protect himself from (emotional) pain.
So from this POV, becoming a Kiznaiver again is helping Katsuhira by overstimulating the right side of his brain and sort of “unlocking” the emotional blockages Katsuhira set, not to mention force-awakening his empathy. But the last key to fully awaken Katsuhira’s emotions should technically be Noriko because losing her would be what triggered his alexithymia in the first place.
Haha, I loved reading about this because knowing the severity of the condition and comparing both, Noriko and Katsuhira really make Katsuhira’s development even more obvious. After all, he is now becoming more emotionally awareness and forming emotional attachments again!
That said, I’m still hoping the Kiznaiver System being shady / Noriko being self-sacrificial is partly to blame for Noriko’s condition, so that there may be a way for Katsuhira to help her regain her emotions as well by the end lol
ns 15.158.61.39da2
