PhronesisCompulsive self-surveillance describes a chronic attentional posture in which a person continuously monitors their own behavior, expression, and presentation as though observed by an external evaluative authority. We argue that this state constitutes a wrong attractor in the dynamical-systems sense: a stable configuration that the system enters and from which ordinary perturbation cannot escape, yet which is displaced from the system's optimal ground state of calibrated unselfconscious action.
Drawing on the Displacement Framework (Rinc\'on et al., 2025), we define the ground state S^0 as the basin of spontaneous, context-responsive self-expression; the displacement field D() as the deviation from S^0 induced by internalized surveillance; and the accumulated displacement = D()\,dt as the cost that compounds when the attractor holds. We identify the panopticon architecture—Foucault's internalized gaze rendered as a self-reinforcing computational loop—as the mechanism that sustains the wrong attractor and forecloses return to S^0.
Nine formal propositions characterize the geometry of entrapment and the conditions for exit. We analyze clinical homologs in social anxiety, body dysmorphia, performance anxiety, and social-media self-presentation. The paper concludes with a framework for return: not correction of the observed self but dissolution of the observer function, restoring the agent to inhabited, calibrated, unselfconscious action.