straitjacket

1. (literally) To put someone into a straitjacket.Examples: "What he asked himself now was,—could Miss Edge and Miss Baker, in order to get him out of the house, have set Birt onto Elizabeth, be in league with the man to break a poor old fellow down by simply driving his sad girl out of her wits? To have her straitjacketted even, muffled in a padded room?"Synonyms: jacket#Verbliterally

2. (by extension) To restrict the freedom of, either physically or psychologically.Examples: "Charles for five whole days in a Victorian topper and tailcoat when he practically had to be straitjacketted to get him into tails for a three-hour wedding?"; "Encouraging, allowing for, and maintaining a plurality of viewpoints concerning public policy, for instance, adaptively (even though partially and incompletely) reduces the chances of a rigidly deterministic and reductionistic mindset maladaptively straitjacketting our abilities to deal with dynamic complexity and to appreciate the benefits of malleability and self-criticality in remaining open to the challenges of our environment."; "But it has not always been like this. The last time human remains hit the headlines occurred when the government-sponsored Palmer Report was published. It was deeply antagonistic to research on human remains, and recommended straitjacketing archaeological research within the same framework as medical science."broadly