PhronesisWe argue that compulsive diagnosing of others — the chronic habit of reaching immediately for a psychiatric or psychological label (narcissist, borderline, ADHD, codependent, attachment-disordered) to categorize persons encountered in everyday life — constitutes a wrong attractor W_ DO in the dynamical landscape of relational engagement. The ground state S^0 is calibrated open reception: the sustained capacity to encounter another person without a prior categorical frame, holding genuine uncertainty about who they are while remaining responsive to what actually emerges.
We define a displacement cost D() for label-first engagement, an accumulated displacement = D()\,dt, and characterize the basin geometry of the authentic-encounter foreclosure attractor. We distinguish compulsive diagnosing from appropriate clinical assessment, identify the five-stage label-first architecture, analyze the psychological function of categorization as anxiety-management and control, and connect the analysis to Buber's I–Thou versus I–It distinction, Levinas's phenomenology of the face, and the epistemic hazards of premature categorization documented in diagnosis research.
Nine propositions structure the argument. Return paths toward S^0 are mapped.