Compulsive Pseudo-Listening as Contact-Avoidance Wrong Attractor: The Performance-Override Architecture, Genuine-Reception Foreclosure Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Present Hearing

Compulsive pseudo-listening—the habitual performance of attentive hearing while covertly preparing a response—constitutes a stable wrong attractor in the dynamical landscape of interpersonal contact. This paper formalizes pseudo-listening through the Phronesis displacement framework, characterizing it as a state in which the agent's cognitive resources are captured by response-preparation circuitry before reception of incoming signal is complete.

We introduce the displacement functional = D()\,dt, where D() measures the gap between the agent's actual attentional state and calibrated present hearing S^0. Pseudo-listening is shown to be self-reinforcing: the performance of listening generates social feedback that rewards the behavior independent of genuine comprehension, creating a foreclosure basin from which return requires active trajectory correction.

We identify the performance-override architecture as the mechanistic substrate: a response-preparation loop that runs in parallel with, and systematically crowds out, the receptive channel. Nine formal propositions specify the geometry of the wrong attractor, the depth of the foreclosure basin, and the conditions under which exit toward calibrated present hearing becomes dynamically feasible.

The analysis connects to established literatures on conversational narcissism, empathy gaps, anxiety-driven social performance, and active listening research, while extending these accounts through a precise attractor-theoretic treatment.