PhronesisCompleting and releasing work is a fundamental act of a functioning agent. In its calibrated form, the person produces work to a standard adequate for its purpose, tolerates the residual imperfections intrinsic to any finite human product, releases it, and proceeds. Compulsive perfectionist paralysis is formally reconceptualised here within the Displacement Framework as a wrong attractor W_ CPP in the landscape of productive functioning, structurally distinct from the healthy ground state S^0_ CFW — Calibrated Finished Work — which is the capacity to bring work to a good-enough standard and release it without requiring flawlessness as a precondition of completion.
The perfectionist operates under a flawlessness-requirement architecture in which finishing is contingent on achieving an ideal that is formally unreachable: the standard is not a fixed bar but a moving horizon that recedes with each improvement. This paper distinguishes compulsive perfectionist paralysis sharply from high standards, careful craftsmanship, and adaptive quality investment, which are features of S^0_ CFW.
The perfectionist's relationship to the work is governed by three sustaining mechanisms: (1) flawlessness-as-safety, in which releasing imperfect work is experienced as catastrophic exposure to judgment rather than a normal transaction; (2) revision-as-progress illusion, in which the activity of refining and improving is experienced as movement toward completion when it is structurally movement away from it; and (3) good-enough foreclosure, in which the concept of a product that is adequate without being ideal becomes cognitively unavailable, so that the only alternatives the agent can represent are perfection and failure.
Nine propositions formalise these mechanisms, the dynamics of the moving horizon standard, the cost accumulation of withheld work, and the return paths through calibrated release and standard recalibration.