‘Free to Do What I Want’? Exploring the ambivalent effects of liberating leadership
从精神分析视角研究解放型领导如何引发追随者强烈心理依附，同时带来个人耗竭、过度快乐压力和替罪羊等阴暗面。
This study examines the phenomenon of ‘liberating leadership’, an emerging trend promising self-mastery and collective unity, resonating with the literature on post-heroic leadership. We evaluate the claims of liberating leadership from a psychodynamic perspective, using a Lacanian approach. We examine how post-heroic forms of leadership reconfigure symbolic and imaginary aspects of follower identification, with ambivalent effects. Drawing empirically on the case of a Belgian banking department, we trace how a ‘liberating’ leader was able to garner intense psychological attachment among followers, accompanied by the ‘dark sides’ of personal exhaustion and breakdown, normative pressure to be overly happy, and the scapegoating of contrarian managers representing symbolic prohibition.