PhronesisAnticipatory grief — the pre-loss mourning response triggered by an expected future loss that has not yet occurred — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_AG in the landscape of present-anchored accompaniment. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as present-anchored accompaniment: the capacity to remain emotionally available to a person who is dying or declining, grieve proportionately as losses accrue in real time, and tolerate the irreducible uncertainty of timing without wholesale temporal displacement into the future.
W_AG is the pathological pole in which anticipatory mourning consumes present connection: the person is psychologically buried before biological death, the mourner disengages from the remaining relationship, and grief is performed for a loss that has not yet fully occurred. The displacement framework illuminates two basin mechanisms: temporal displacement forward (mourning a future state as though present) and the secondary loss of the living relationship through premature emotional severance.
Anticipatory grief is rigorously distinguished from adaptive pre-loss preparation and from prolonged grief disorder. Nine formal propositions characterize the temporal displacement architecture, the premature-severance mechanism, basin-deepening factors including ambiguous loss, death anxiety, and attachment style, the paradox of protective disengagement, and return paths through present-moment accompaniment, meaning-making, and grief rhythm practices.