[ned]

  For instance, one day at school he was working with the student theatre.
  All week he had been struggling to produce the right sound effects, 
  but it just wasn’t coming together. Eventually, his boss lost his cool
  and started ripping into him. “My response was that something weird was
  happening with my body,” he says. “I could feel a tension, like my heart
  was racing, but my mind was distracted…

Isn't this an extreme case of repressing emotions, in the most classic sense? The disconnect between bodily reaction and lack of mindfullness seems to indicate it.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Maybe, since they're talking about Alexithymia, which is defined as "inability to identify and describe emotions in the self". (1)

Who actually has no emotions whatsoever and stays alive? What about primitive things like e.g. the feeling of shock and terror as you are crossing the road and turn to see a bus bearing down on you. This is a basic animal survival response. If all you can say is "my heart was racing" that's not exactly being unemotional, but uncomprehending.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexithymia

[jaggederest]

I think it's more along the lines of an agnosia or aphasia. They receive the same somatic input, it's just not translated into affect the way most people do, in the same way that a face doesn't register 'faceness' to someone with prosopagnosia.

[VLM]

Maybe it was a bad example for the author to use because it sounds like whats been described to me as symptoms of a panic attack. Or it might be that pathological panic attacks are an example of the emotional problem in the story.

From talking to people who've had medical panic attack problems, it seems common for them to confuse how to name the bodily symptoms, so they show up in the ER confused why they're sweating bullets and feeling very confused and heart rate of 150 thinking they're having a heart attack or stroke instead of "just" an out of control emotional response.

Or it could be that their treatment plan for repressed emotions leading to panic attacks is a lifetime dose of a pill. Maybe that is the best treatment plan for them; none of my business, I guess, other than that specific example might have been a bad choice for the article because of confusing factors.

[mercer]

From what i understand panic attacks are easily treated exactly because, as you say, the primary problem is that the person having the attack erroneously confuses the physical symptoms with something more serious. Through cognitive behavioral therapy they can learn to fix this, and as a result the panic attacks disappear (or at least the initial panic doesn't spiral into a full-blown attack). Similar approaches have also been successful in treating phobias and other issues.

For anyone interested in the topic (and CBT in general) I can highly recomment [What You Can Change and What You Can't - The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement](http://www.amazon.com/What-You-Change-Cant-Self-Improvement/...) by Martin Seligman.

As someone who has recently developed a bit of an obsession with mindfulness/zen/meditation, this book is a good example of the parallels between that and the field of psychology.