PhronesisCompulsive empathy-broadcasting (CEB) is here formalized within the Displacement Framework as a distinct wrong attractor W_CEB in the landscape of interpersonal attunement—a stable self-organizing configuration in which a person's empathic responses are systematically routed through public narration, display, and performance rather than deployed in service of the other person. This is categorically distinct from appropriate expression of care, from compulsive caretaking (which organizes the self around fixing rather than feeling), and from the codependency configuration.
The subject in W_CEB does not primarily seek to manage the other's distress; they seek to demonstrate, confirm, and receive social recognition for their capacity to feel with the other. The empathic response is real—the feeling is often genuine—but it is captured by a display architecture that redirects its function from connection to self-presentation. Three sustaining mechanisms of the wrong attractor are formally developed.
The first is sensitivity-as-identity encoding: the organization of core self-concept around being a highly empathic, emotionally resonant person, such that the compulsive broadcasting is a continuous identity maintenance operation. The second is emotional-responsiveness as social currency: the implicit belief that demonstrated empathy generates social capital, approval, and relational access, making empathy-signaling intrinsically rewarding independent of its effect on the other person.
The third is empathy-display compulsion: the automatic need to verbalize, gesture, or otherwise broadcast the felt empathic response, experienced such that suppression of the broadcast feels like suppression of the empathy itself. The central theoretical contribution of the paper is the Empathy-Broadcasting Paradox: compulsive narration of empathic response systematically centers the self at the moment when the other person needs to be centered, transforming what appears to be attention to the other into a demand on the other's attention.
The ground state S^0 is calibrated attunement—emotional resonance that is organized around what the other person needs, with the empathic response deployed in service of connection rather than self-presentation. Nine formal propositions and the return-path topology are developed. This is Paper 650 in the Displacement Framework series (“The Phronesis Issues”).