About this event

Join us for our next installment in our policial mind series with speaker Professor Lea Ypi. 

Lea Ypi's Indignity explores her grandmother's life across the collapse of the Ottoman aristocracy, the devastations of fascism, and the rise of communism in Albania, raising unsettling questions about memory, survival, and truth. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the silences, fictions, and contradictions within such histories invite us to think with Freud on family romance, Klein on guilt and reparation, Bion on the necessity of truth, and Ferenczi on the transmission of trauma. This seminar will consider dignity as a psychic achievement a defence against humiliation and erasure, and ask how families metabolise catastrophe, what unconscious legacies are passed between generations, and with what authority we can judge the compromises of those who lived through extremes of history. 

Lea Ypi is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Ecomonics and Adjunct Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Australian National University. She was born in Tirana, Albania, and educated in Italy and the UK. Her research spans Marxism, critical theory, normative political philosophy, and the history of political thought. She is the author of Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize) and Indignity: On the Dignity of the Undignified. Ypi frequently writes for international newspapers and journals, bringing philosophical and political questions into public debate. 

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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Views and opinions expressed by speakers are their own and do not represent the views or opinions of the Institute, event organisers or other speakers. We expect delegates to respect the confidentiality of clinical material discussed in our events. The content must not be recorded, conveyed or disseminated in any format and participants must not share access to the event with non-registered participants.

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