pseudoliberation

plural pseudoliberations

1. countableuncountableFalse liberation; The process or instance of appearing to be liberation while not actually liberating.

   One moment I was ashamed and frightened, another recklessly optimistic. Taboos strangulated me. Psychoanalysts wooed me with pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes.

   1955 September 15, Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Paris: The Olympia Press […], →OCLC

   3 more examples

   In such reconciliation of doing and undergoing, liberation becomes mutual, in contrast to the one-sided pseudoliberation of the revolutionary who, in his moment of triumph, turns into vengeful counteroppressor and thereby perpetuates a negative mutuality; rather, a positive mutuality through which both parties gain a new awareness of, and freedom for, each other, is needed.

   1981, Helm Stierlin, Separating parents and adolescents: individuation in the family

   Viewing instinctual liberation as a purely individual process is as paradoxical as attempting to "save" a wild animal by removing it from its habitat: in both cases, foregrounding the individual and ignoring the context ensures that the liberation is a pseudoliberation into an industrialist arena rather than an authentic articulation of individual structures into a sympathetic natural space.

   2001, David W. Kidner, Nature and Psyche: Radical Environmentalism and the Politics of Subjectivity

   He understood the male desire for escape, and his movies are a kind of “man's movie” not unlike the old women's pictures that gave women a form of pseudoliberation and lots of terrific clothes and furniture to ogle.

   2012, Jeanine Basinger, Silent Stars