Alexithymia as Emotional Displacement Blindness: Interoceptive Disconnection, Somatization as Misrouted Cost Signal, and the Ground State of Emotional Literacy

We apply the Displacement Framework to alexithymia — the difficulty identifying and describing one's own emotions — formalizing it as displacement signal blindness: not an absence of emotion but a disruption of the cognitive-affective interface that translates somatic D(ξ) signals into emotional awareness and language. The emotional literacy ground state S°_emotional is defined as the capacity to detect, label, and communicate one's own emotional states accurately.

Emotions are displacement signals encoding D(ξ) along various dimensions (threat → fear, loss → grief, violation → anger); alexithymia is sensor malfunction, not absence of the sensed thing. Nine formal propositions are derived covering: the TAS-20 four-dimension structure (difficulty identifying feelings, describing feelings, externally-oriented thinking, poor fantasy) mapped to distinct failure modes in the displacement-signal reading chain, somatization as misrouted displacement cost when the cognitive channel is blocked (the body keeps score because the mind cannot read the score), the dissociation of alexithymia from autism spectrum disorder (interoceptive disconnection rather than autism per se explaining many socio-emotional differences), trauma-induced alexithymia as defensive down-regulation of interoceptive sensors, secondary relational displacement through emotional unavailability, and emotional granularity training as precision-increase intervention.

Return paths include interoception-focused therapy, Pennebaker written disclosure, and emotional vocabulary expansion.