Chronic Label-Seeking as Diagnostic-Identity Wrong Attractor: The Classification-Pursuit Architecture, Self-Knowledge-Without-Category Foreclosure Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Direct Experience

Chronic label-seeking is the compulsive pursuit of diagnostic categories, personality typologies, and clinical labels as the primary — and often exclusive — mode of self-understanding. This paper develops a formal account of why such pursuit constitutes a wrong attractor W in the space of selfhood states, operating in opposition to the ground state S^0 of calibrated direct experience.

We introduce the Classification-Pursuit Architecture (CPA) as the cognitive-motivational system that generates systematic category-seeking as a mechanism for managing the anxiety of unlabeled, unstructured inner experience. We further identify the Self-Knowledge-Without-Category Foreclosure Basin (SKCFB) as the attractor basin that prevents access to pre-conceptual, felt-sense self-knowledge by routing all introspective attention through categorical filters.

Nine propositions (P1–P9) characterize the structure of CPA, the dynamics of the SKCFB, the critical distinction between clinically useful diagnosis and compulsive label-hunting, and the conditions under which return to S^0 becomes possible. Recovery does not require the rejection of clinical knowledge but rather the restoration of direct phenomenological contact as the primary epistemic ground from which categorical understanding, when genuinely useful, is deployed rather than substituted.