PhronesisWe apply the Displacement Framework to agoraphobia — fear and avoidance of situations where escape might be difficult or help unavailable — formalizing it as a progressive spatial wrong attractor W_agora characterized by dynamic safe-zone contraction. The spatial freedom ground state S°_spatial is defined as calibrated navigation: the capacity to occupy and transit public and unfamiliar spaces without disproportionate avoidance behavior, not fearlessness.
Agoraphobia is W_agora, a self-reinforcing wrong attractor in which each avoidance episode confirms the threat assessment and narrows the space classified as safe, producing the defining clinical feature: the shrinking world. Nine formal propositions are derived covering: S°_spatial as calibrated navigation (P1), W_agora as progressive contraction basin (P2), escape-route obsession as cognitive landscape restructuring (P3), safe-person dependency as external stabilizer creating autonomy erosion and relationship displacement (P4), the shrinking world as cumulative Φ across occupational, relational, and physical domains (P5), the avoidance-confirmation loop as basin-deepening mechanism (P6), graduated exposure as systematic return-path engineering (P7), the benzodiazepine paradox (acute relief at the cost of long-term basin deepening) (P8), and digital accommodation as invisible basin maintenance (P9).
The paper distinguishes agoraphobia from panic disorder with agoraphobia (a common misclassification), formalizes the safe-person dependency mechanism, and analyzes why the shrinking world progresses rapidly once initiated.