PhronesisThe chronic need for the last word—the compulsion to ensure that one's voice is always the final one in any exchange—is here analyzed as a wrong attractor W operating against the ground state S^0 of calibrated open ending. We introduce the Conversation-Capping Architecture (CCA) as the generative mechanism: a closed-loop system that produces closure-seeking behavior not from communicative necessity but from the management of unresolved conversational anxiety.
Left unchecked, the CCA locks speakers into a posture of perpetual summary-seizure, eroding the relational ecology required for genuine mutual completion. The complementary construct of the Mutual-Completion Foreclosure Basin names the attractor neighborhood from which organic conversation endings cannot emerge once one participant has seized the closing function. Nine propositions characterize the phenomenology, dynamics, and remediation of chronic last-word compulsion: the primacy of unresolved-tension anxiety (P1), the last word as pseudo-resolution (P2), others' recognition and progressive resistance (P3), dominator identity lock-in (P4), the relational cost of perpetual capping (P5), the diagnostic distinction between appropriate summary and compulsive closure-seizure (P6), return requiring allowed silence and open ending (P7), gradual recalibration via the deliberately unfinished contribution (P8), and S^0 stability in conversations that end when they end (P9).
The paper concludes that calibrated open ending is not a loss of voice but the recovery of the space in which voice can matter.