PhronesisCompulsive thought-cataloguing is the psychological disposition to observe, classify, and inventory one's own thoughts as they arise, rather than simply allowing them to occur and to function. We analyze this disposition as a wrong attractor W relative to the ground state S^0 of calibrated, unmonitored flow. The architecture sustaining it—the Internal-Inventory Architecture (IIA)—is a continuous metacognitive narration loop that generates secondary representations of each first-order mental event, crowding out direct experience and replacing spontaneous engagement with taxonomic labor.
The attractor's basin, which we call the Spontaneous-Presence Foreclosure Basin (SPFB), is the region of cognitive state-space in which unmediated experience has become unavailable, not because the capacity is absent but because the monitoring system fires pre-emptively on every potential moment of it. Nine propositions formalize the structure, consequences, and dissolution conditions of this attractor.
The main clinical and practical upshot is that return to S^0 requires developing tolerance for unmonitored engagement rather than improved monitoring technique, and proceeds through graduated absorption practice rather than through insight alone. The paper closes with a characterization of S^0 stability: thought that can think without being watched.