About this event

Join us for our next installment in our policial mind series with speaker Professor Jennifer Joy Freyd.

Institutional courage—like its opposite, institutional betrayal—is not merely a matter of policy or governance. It is a matter of psychic structure and relational ethics. From a psychoanalytic perspective, institutions are not inert structures; they are psychic containers, saturated with unconscious processes: identifications, projections, idealisations, and disavowals.

Those in positions of leadership carry the greatest symbolic weight they are the superego function of the institution, setting the tone for what is speakable, what is defensively split off, and what can be borne. When leaders enact denial, complicity, or moral foreclosure, they foster a culture of institutional betrayal: a traumatic rupture between what an institution claims to be and what it enacts in reality. This rupture induces cynicism, apathy, and a withdrawal of libidinal investment what Bion might call a collapse of “faith” in the containing function of the group.

Yet psychoanalysis also teaches that transformation does not belong solely to the powerful. Change begins wherever there is truth-telling—where an individual, even without structural power, refuses collusion with denial and instead occupies a depressive position: capable of mourning, complexity, and responsibility. When such individuals link with others, a new symbolic space can open within the institution—what D.W. Winnicott might call a “transitional space” in which play, protest, and potential begin to emerge.

In the face of political disintegration and epistemic overload—where people say, “I don’t know what’s true anymore”—the risk is not only political but psychic: the collapse into learned helplessness and internal splitting. As Anne Applebaum warns, the real threat is apathy. In psychoanalytic terms, this is the movement toward psychic retreat, toward fragmentation and withdrawal from the shared symbolic field.

The antidote is not grandiosity or omnipotence, but engagement: small acts of participation that restore agency and relationality. Joining a group, running for local office, even showing up in a shared space—these are not just political acts but reparative ones. They affirm the possibility of symbolisation in the face of chaos. They are, in Melanie Klein’s sense, acts of reparation—attempts to restore meaning, coherence, and the possibility of shared truth.

In this view, democracy itself can be understood as a system that thrives when its members inhabit a depressive position: where difference is tolerated, conflict is borne, and idealisation gives way to mutual responsibility. Institutional courage, then, is not the absence of fear, but the refusal of psychic foreclosure. It is the work of mourning, thinking, and linking—undertaken not just by leaders, but by anyone willing to stay mentally and ethically present.

Please note: This event will be recorded and available for 1 week to all registered participants.

Concession tickets are available, for students, BPAS candidates and NHS trainees. Please email [email protected] if you are unsure if you qualify for a concession ticket.

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