PhronesisCompulsive interviewing — the habitual pattern of directing sustained, intensive questioning toward others while systematically withholding self-disclosure — is commonly read as a social asset: the perpetual interviewer appears curious, generous, genuinely interested in others. This paper argues against that reading. Within the Displacement Framework, compulsive interviewing is reconceptualised as a wrong attractor W_CI organised not by authentic curiosity but by intimacy avoidance: the question functions as a shield, the other person's disclosures substituting for a mutual encounter that would require the interviewer to expose themselves.
The ground state S^0 — calibrated reciprocal sharing — is the configuration in which curiosity about others and willingness to be known by others are held in dynamic balance, producing the mutual vulnerability from which genuine intimacy emerges. The wrong attractor W_CI forecloses this state through a question architecture that maintains asymmetric disclosure: the other person speaks, the interviewer listens, and the encounter is experienced by the interviewer as intimate while remaining, structurally, one-directional.
Three mechanisms maintain the basin: the question-as-shield, the curiosity-performance, and reciprocity violation. The mutual-disclosure foreclosure basin describes the geometry by which perpetual questioning prevents the genuine intimacy it performs pursuing. Nine formal propositions develop this architecture. Return paths include the recognition of self-concealment, graduated self-disclosure practice, and the cultivation of tolerance for being known.