Dependent Personality Disorder as Autonomy-Foreclosure Wrong Attractor: The Helplessness Architecture, Caretaker-Binding Mechanism, and the Return to Self-Directed Agency

Dependent personality disorder is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_DPD in the landscape of agency development. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as self-directed agency: the capacity to make decisions, tolerate aloneness, initiate action, and hold one's own perspective without requiring another's support or approval. W_DPD arises when the autonomy development process is blocked — through overprotective parenting, anxious attachment, or cultural context — such that dependency becomes the organizing attractor: any movement toward autonomous action triggers catastrophic anxiety resolved by submission or clinging.

Nine formal propositions characterize the helplessness architecture, the caretaker-binding mechanism, the autonomy paradox (dependency provokes eventual abandonment, confirming the fear), and return paths through graduated autonomy exposure, assertiveness training, and schema therapy.