Professor Lea Ypi. Indignity: Historical Trauma, Dignity, and the Transmission
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Join us for our next installment in our policial mind series
Professor Lea Ypi.
Indignity: Historical Trauma, Dignity, and the Transmission of Truth
Chair Jonathan Sklar
Tuesday 4th November 2025
8.15-9.45 pm
Lea Ypi's book “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.
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