Compulsive Compliment-Seeking as External-Validation Wrong Attractor: The Praise-Solicitation Architecture, Intrinsic-Satisfaction Foreclosure Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Self-Referenced Appreciation

Compulsive compliment-seeking represents a paradigmatic instance of what the displacement framework identifies as a wrong attractor: a behavioral basin that mimics the phenomenology of self-worth without instantiating its causal substrate. This paper develops a formal treatment of praise-solicitation behavior as a dynamical system in which the agent's locus of valuation is progressively displaced from an intrinsic ground state S^0 — calibrated, self-referenced appreciation — toward an external-validation equilibrium W characterized by structural instability, affective volatility, and the systematic foreclosure of intrinsic satisfaction.

We define the displacement cost function D() over the validation-seeking trajectory (t), derive the accumulated displacement = D()\,dt, and characterize the depth and topology of the foreclosure basin. Nine formal Propositions (P1–P9) develop the architecture of the wrong attractor, the mechanisms by which habitual praise-solicitation forecloses intrinsic satisfaction, the phase-transition structure of recovery, and the ethical dimensions of systemic compliment economies.

We derive conditions under which return to S^0 remains tractable and identify the intervention geometry that minimizes re-displacement cost. The framework has implications for therapeutic intervention, organizational culture, and the design of feedback environments.