Compulsive Gift-Giving as Material-Substitute-for-Presence Wrong Attractor: The Object-as-Connection Architecture, Relational-Debt Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Generous Presence

Compulsive gift-giving is reconceptualized within the Displacement Framework as a formally distinct wrong attractor W_gift in the landscape of relational functioning—a stable, self-reinforcing configuration in which gifts, objects, money, and material gestures serve as the primary mechanism for establishing, demonstrating, and maintaining relational connection. The compulsive gift-giver gives far beyond occasion-appropriateness, gives when giving is not called for, gives when they cannot afford to give, and experiences genuine anxiety when they arrive—at any threshold, literal or figurative—empty-handed.

The wrong attractor is not benign generosity in excess. It is a displacement from the more anxiety-producing but more genuinely connective act of emotional presence: the gift substitutes for the giver's direct availability, producing a brief, real connection-signal (I gave, therefore we are bonded) that does not address the underlying difficulty with unmediated emotional contact.

Three sustaining mechanisms are formally analyzed: (1) object-as-proxy encoding, in which gifts are experienced as love made concrete and durable—an object persisting in the recipient's space when the giver is absent, serving as a proxy for continuous emotional connection; (2) the obligation-and-reciprocity loop, in which chronic giving creates a social debt in recipients that the giver may unconsciously rely on as a relational anchor, maintaining connection through manufactured obligation rather than genuine desire; and (3) giving-as-emotional-regulation, in which the act of selecting, purchasing, and presenting a gift functions as an absorbing, affect-regulating displacement from the harder work of direct emotional engagement.

Nine formal propositions (P1–P9) are developed with proofs, a dynamical model in ordinary differential equations is provided, and return paths toward the ground state of Calibrated Generous Presence—in which gifts supplement rather than substitute for emotional availability—are analyzed. This is paper 729 in the Displacement Framework series (“The Phronesis Issues”).