PhronesisWe apply the Displacement Framework to Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), formalizing it as a psychogenic wrong attractor W_fnd in which the brain's predictive processing system generates genuine neurological symptoms without structural lesion. The neurological ground state S°_neuro is defined as the configuration in which motor commands produce expected movements, sensory signals are registered accurately, the brain's predictions about bodily state are calibrated, and the person experiences agency over voluntary movement.
FND is formally grounded in the Bayesian predictive processing account (Friston, Edwards et al.): the brain generates predictions about incoming sensory and motor states; in FND, a maladaptive prior (template of dysfunction formed by injury, illness, anesthesia, or acute stress) acquires high precision weighting and overrides bottom-up sensory signals, generating genuine neurological expression of the predictive model.
The symptoms are real and involuntary — not feigned — but generated by the brain's own predictive machinery. Two cognitive mechanisms maintain W_fnd: paradoxical attention (attending to the affected system amplifies the predictive dysfunction signal, formalized as dδ/dt ∝ Π_attention) and agency dissociation (the symptom is experienced as involuntary despite being generated by the person's own nervous system).
The stigma trap — 'no organic cause' interpreted as 'not real' — is formally modeled as a five-mechanism iatrogenic deepening of W_fnd. Nine formal propositions are derived covering: symptom reality vs. structural causation, maladaptive prior formation, attentional deepening, agency dissociation, precipitant typology, stigma deepening, the therapeutic role of explanation, physiotherapy bypass strategies, and interdisciplinary treatment superiority.
The return path prioritizes specialist physiotherapy using movement strategies that bypass the maladaptive predictive loop.