Avoidance and Displacement in Human Psychic Processing

This technical note develops a typed account of avoidance and displacement within the Human Psychic Processing / Psychological Architecture branch of GTCS. Avoidance is not defined as absence of processing, negative focal attention, restricted accessibility, structural inadmissibility, repetition, affect-like modulation, or pathology. Instead, an independently established provenance-bearing primary target is assessed under a declared target-relative avoidance criterion, context, and nonempty positively aligned evidence profile. The resulting avoidance relation is partial. Undefinedness, completed negative assessment, and completed positive avoidance remain distinct. A positive result establishes only that the exact primary target satisfies the declared avoidance criterion under the declared evidence basis; it does not explain why the pattern occurs or what function it serves. Displacement is defined separately and more narrowly. It is available only after a complete positive avoidance application has already been established. A positive displacement application additionally requires a distinct provenance-bearing substitute, a separately declared primary–substitute relation criterion and context, and a nonempty evidence profile containing at least one positively aligned same-pair relation witness. Positive displacement therefore preserves its corresponding positive avoidance application by construction, whereas positive avoidance does not imply that any substitute or displacement relation exists. The architecture blocks reverse inference from substitutes to hidden primaries. Co-occurrence, attention switching, thematic similarity, shared content, recurrence of the substitute, or ordinary-language labels do not by themselves identify an avoided primary or establish displacement. Attention, symbolic regulation, structural-transformation records, affect-like modulation, repetition and return, significance, overload, identity, coherence, manifestation, and symbolic capture may enter as exact typed targets or evidence, but none transfers its status into avoidance or displacement. Neither avoidance nor displacement establishes protection, rigidity, defense, persistence, restricted accessibility, structural transformation, hidden meaning, clinical function, behavioral withdrawal, or pathology. The resulting construction therefore provides bounded human-processing application surfaces with explicit provenance and inferential limits.