IN-HOUSE – Black Oedipus, by Rita Segato
An evening symposium to celebrate the publication of Rita Segato’s ‘Black Oedipus’.
This ticket is for IN-HOUSE access to this event.
________________________________________________________________________
The Freud Museum is delighted to host the book launch of ‘Black Oedipus’ by anthropologist Rita Segato, translated from Spanish by Ramsey McGlazer (1968 Press, 2026).
This evening symposium dedicated to the book (6:00pm – 9:00pm), with the presence of both the author and the translator, will be followed by a wine reception (9pm – 10pm). The symposium is available both in person and online.
Blindness is a theme that pervades the story of Oedipus and the Oedipus complex itself. Anthropologist Rita Segato's seminal intervention into the field of psychoanalytic studies of Oedipal relations shows up blind spots left open since Sigmund Freud's times—in relation to race, gender, and class. Drawing on the Brazilian context, Segato writes an at-once personal and scholarly, critically incisive and accessibly inviting testimonial to the erasure of the figure of the Black nanny from the Oedipal triangle. The Black nanny was to be often abruptly foreclosed from the infant's lifeworld, by the severance of employment.
A chance meeting with a painting that significantly features in Segato’s analysis, and within the pages of this book, jogs an expansive chain of memories. It gives Black Oedipus its impetus as a powerful excavation of the force of colonial foreclosure. It evokes the Black women that would give so much to the care of children of wealthy families.
Presented with prefatory and explanatory materials from anticolonial scholars and commentators Maria Ribeiro and Pascale Molinier, and in a revised translation by Ramsey McGlazer, this is the definitive edition of a classic text in psychoanalysis and anthropology.
Please click here if you would like to purchase an online ticket.
_______________________________________________________________________
On the Evening:
The evening symposium will have two parts. In the first part, introduced and moderated by editors Raluca Soreanu and Lizaveta van Munsteren, we will hear from author Rita Segato, translator & literary scholar Ramsey McGlazer, introduction author Pascale Molinier, and translator & psychoanalyst Kristina Valendinova. The second part will be introduced and moderated by psychoanalyst Tania Rivera, and it will bring together writer & literary critic Hortense J. Spillers, preface author & social thinker Maria Ribeiro, and psychoanalysts Diana Caine and Kwame Yonatan.
Black Oedipus is part of the book series Important Little Books in Psychoanalysis (1968 Press), edited by Raluca Soreanu, Lizaveta van Munsteren & the FREEPSY collective. The Series brings to the public radical contributions to psychoanalysis that have not yet been translated into English. 1968 Press editors Daniel Bristow & Graham Smith will also be present for the evening.
The evening symposium will be followed by a wine and canapés reception.
_______________________________________________________________________
Speakers:
Rita Segato is an Argentine anthropologist, with a Ph.D. from the Department of Social Anthropology, Queen's University Belfast, specializing in Social Anthropology and Ethnomusicology (1984). She is Emeritus Professor at the University of Brasilia, having taught in the Anthropology, Bioethics and Human Rights programs; senior Researcher at the Brazilian National Council for Scientific Research (CNPq); and Director of the Rita Segato Chair of Uncomfortable Thought at the National University of San Martín, Argentina. Her work has been translated into a number of languages, and she is the recipient of numerous academic awards. As a human rights activist she created and directed the project ‘Speak up, prisoner! The human right to speak in prison’ at the Brasilia penitentiary, which was later adapted to prisons in the province of Buenos Aires. She co-authored (in collaboration with José Jorge de Carvalho) the first proposal for affirmative action for the admission of black and indigenous students to Brazilian public higher education, and between 2003 and 2011, she accompanied the FUNAI workshops for indigenous women within all regions of Brazil on issues of human rights, gender and violence. She has appeared as an expert witness or judge in tribunals dealing with human rights, including the project ‘Preventing Gender Violence: Experiences and Lessons Learned in Latin America and the Caribbean’ for the United Nations Regional Spotlight Program.
Hortense J. Spillers is a teacher, scholar, literary critic, and writer, widely recognized as the most significant theorist in Black feminist and humanist inquiry. She has had a huge impact on U.S. and global feminist theory and Black studies. The Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor and distinguished research professor emerita at Vanderbilt University, she is the author of “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” one of the most cited essays in African American literary studies. Growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, Spillers was raised in the Black Baptist tradition of the American South, to become, as she would later describe it, “something of a child orator.” As a result, she fell in love with words and the power of their influence, which developed into an abiding interest in politics and law. Her doctoral dissertation laid the foundation for her subsequent scholarship on Black culture and the African diaspora by examining the poetic and narrative form, unifying function and cathartic nature of the Black sermon tradition. Spillers began her career at Wellesley College and has held faculty positions at Haverford College, Cornell University, Emory University and Vanderbilt University. She has taught courses in African and African American literature, Faulkner, and feminist theory. She is the author of Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (2003) and editor of Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (1985, with Marjorie Pryse) and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text (1991). Among numerous career awards, she has been honoured by the Caribbean Philosophical Association with its Nicolás Guillén Lifetime Achievement Award (2017), and with the Brandeis University Alumni Achievement Award (2019), which celebrated her as a “pioneering professor, feminist scholar and critic.”
(adapted from: https://yale2024.yale.edu/honorary-degrees/hortense-j-spillers)
Pascale Molinier is a French psychologist and professor of social psychology at Sorbonne Paris Nord University since 2009. Among other research and editorial roles, from 2014 to 2022, she was editor of the Cahiers du Genre. Her research interests include the psychodynamics of work, institutional psychotherapy, and forms of subjectivation and subjugation related to the gendered division of labour. With Patricia Paperman and Sandra Laugier, she is the author or editor of several books on ethics and care work. Her latest book is Care Work (2025), published in the Ethics of Care series by Peeters Publishers (Leuven, Belgium), in which she argues for a political transformation of work and society by placing care at the centre of the debate on work.
Ramsey McGlazer is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and Senior Editor of Critical Times. He is the author of Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (2020) and the translator of a number of books from Spanish, including, most recently, Rita Segato's The War Against Women (2025). He is working on a book about aesthetics and radical psychiatry, especially in Italy and Brazil, and his public writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Lux Magazine, n+1, and Parapraxis, among other places.
Raluca Soreanu is a psychoanalytic and psychosocial thinker and writer. She is Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK, and a psychoanalyst, member of the Círculo Psicanalítico do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, UK. Her book The Psychic Life of Fragments: On Splitting and the Experience of Time in Psychoanalysis will be published by Routledge in 2026. She is the author of Working-through Collective Wounds: Trauma, Denial, Recognition in the Brazilian Uprising (Palgrave, 2018) and the co-author, with Jenny Willner and Jakob Staberg, of Ferenczi Dialogues: On Trauma and Catastrophe (Leuven University Press, 2023). She is the project lead of the interdisciplinary research project FREEPSY: Free Clinics and a Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices, Implications for Our Times (UKRI Frontier Research Grant); Academic Associate of The Freud Museum London; and Editor of the Studies in the Psychosocial series at Palgrave and of the Important Little Books in Psychoanalysis Series at 1968 Press.
Lizaveta van Munsteren, PhD, is a psychodynamic psychotherapist (BPC) and academic with a research focus in psychoanalytic theory and history. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher with the FREEPSY project at the University of Essex, UK, working on theoretical formulations of the psychoanalytic frame in free clinics, and archives of free clinics in Vienna and Budapest. She is a lecturer in psychotherapy at King's College London, and teaches Freud at the Bowlby Centre.
Kristina Valendinova is a psychoanalyst based in London, member of CFAR in London and the Cercle Freudien in Paris. She is the co-founder of Bubble and Speak, a drop-in for young children and their families.
Tania Rivera is a psychoanalyst and essayist whose work spans multiple disciplines, moving between psychoanalysis, philosophy, and both artistic and literary theory and practice. Her research seeks to gather and unfold proposals for delineating the subject within culture at a micropolitical level, contributing to discussions on gender and the decolonization of thought. She holds a PhD in Psychology from the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium (1996), and is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Art at Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil. In 2016, she was a visiting professor in the Department of Plastic Arts at Université Paris 8 – Vincennes-Saint-Denis. Rivera received the Jabuti Prize in Psychology/Psychoanalysis (2014) for her book O Avesso do Imaginário: Arte Contemporânea e Psicanálise (The Reverse of the Imaginary: Contemporary Art and Psychoanalysis, Cosac Naify, 2013). Her most recent book, Lugares do Delírio – Arte e Expressão, Loucura e Política (Places of Delirium – Art and Expression, Madness and Politics; n-1 edições, 2023), continues this line of inquiry. She has also worked as a curator, notably of the exhibition Lugares do Delírio (Places of Delirium, Rio Art Museum, 2017; Sesc Pompeia, 2018), among others.
Maria Ribeiro is a social scientist (PUC-SP), with an MA (PUC-SP) and a PhD (PUC-SP/Université Paris-Diderot) in Communication and Semiotics. Professor in the Graduate Programme in Humanities, Rights and Other Legitimacies (PPGHDL/FFLCH) at the University of São Paulo (USP) and in the General Coordination for Specialisation, Professional Development and Extension (COGEAE) at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP). Rapporteur-General of the International Symposium on Birth Care (SIAPARTO), member of the Coletivo Psicanálise Periférica (Peripheral Psychoanalysis Collective), and author of the book Ginecológicas: nascimento negro para além da tragédia.
Diana Caine was Consultant Neuropsychologist at the National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery, London where she worked for a number of years as both neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst. She is currently a psychoanalyst in private practice. Her published research focused on disorders of autobiographical and semantic memory, and on psychotic-like phenomena in neurological patients, especially delusions of misidentification, drawing on psychoanalytic theory to re-think the implications of neurological damage for human subjectivity. More recently she has turned her interest in psychoanalysis and her critical attention to aspects of coloniality, particularly to the relation between settler colonial infants and the enslaved or indentured women who cared for them. An article on this subject appeared as ‘Apartheid’s paradox: Impossible borders, unspeakable intimacies’ in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2023), a version of which will be incorporated in a book, working title Mothering in the Colonies, to be published by Routledge in 2026.
Kwame Yonatan is a psychoanalyst, postdoctoral fellow from USP and PhD from PUC-SP. He works as a clinical and institutional supervisor. He is a professor at Instituto Gerar, Centro de Estudos Psicanalíticos, and Casa do Saber. Poet and writer, he has published four books: Transverso, Nasce um desejo, Feliz para sempre?, and Por um fio: uma escuta das diásporas pulsionais, which will soon have an English translation. He has professional experience in public policy. He is currently also a member of the Margens Clínicas collective and one of the organizers of the "Aquilombamento nas Margens" project. Capoeirista with the Angoleiros do Sertão group. Father of Kalihe Harumi and Dayô Maru.
_______________________________________________________________________
Tickets:
Solidarity Ticket - £25
Standard Ticket - £15
A limited number of £10 bursary tickets are available for those under financial hardship. Please email perry@freud.org.uk to apply for a bursary.
The purpose of this event is to raise funds for the Freud Museum London, which receives no regular Government income. We are grateful to you for supporting our independent museum as generously as possible.
The event will be held on the first floor of the Museum during regular opening hours. Unfortunately the Freud Museum does not have step-free access at this time. Advance booking is highly recommended as capacity is limited.
An evening symposium to celebrate the publication of Rita Segato’s ‘Black Oedipus’.
This ticket is for IN-HOUSE access to this event.
________________________________________________________________________
The Freud Museum is delighted to host the book launch of ‘Black Oedipus’ by anthropologist Rita Segato, translated from Spanish by Ramsey McGlazer (1968 Press, 2026).
This evening symposium dedicated to the book (6:00pm – 9:00pm), with the presence of both the author and the translator, will be followed by a wine reception (9pm – 10pm). The symposium is available both in person and online.
Blindness is a theme that pervades the story of Oedipus and the Oedipus complex itself. Anthropologist Rita Segato's seminal intervention into the field of psychoanalytic studies of Oedipal relations shows up blind spots left open since Sigmund Freud's times—in relation to race, gender, and class. Drawing on the Brazilian context, Segato writes an at-once personal and scholarly, critically incisive and accessibly inviting testimonial to the erasure of the figure of the Black nanny from the Oedipal triangle. The Black nanny was to be often abruptly foreclosed from the infant's lifeworld, by the severance of employment.
A chance meeting with a painting that significantly features in Segato’s analysis, and within the pages of this book, jogs an expansive chain of memories. It gives Black Oedipus its impetus as a powerful excavation of the force of colonial foreclosure. It evokes the Black women that would give so much to the care of children of wealthy families.
Presented with prefatory and explanatory materials from anticolonial scholars and commentators Maria Ribeiro and Pascale Molinier, and in a revised translation by Ramsey McGlazer, this is the definitive edition of a classic text in psychoanalysis and anthropology.
Please click here if you would like to purchase an online ticket.
_______________________________________________________________________
On the Evening:
The evening symposium will have two parts. In the first part, introduced and moderated by editors Raluca Soreanu and Lizaveta van Munsteren, we will hear from author Rita Segato, translator & literary scholar Ramsey McGlazer, introduction author Pascale Molinier, and translator & psychoanalyst Kristina Valendinova. The second part will be introduced and moderated by psychoanalyst Tania Rivera, and it will bring together writer & literary critic Hortense J. Spillers, preface author & social thinker Maria Ribeiro, and psychoanalysts Diana Caine and Kwame Yonatan.
Black Oedipus is part of the book series Important Little Books in Psychoanalysis (1968 Press), edited by Raluca Soreanu, Lizaveta van Munsteren & the FREEPSY collective. The Series brings to the public radical contributions to psychoanalysis that have not yet been translated into English. 1968 Press editors Daniel Bristow & Graham Smith will also be present for the evening.
The evening symposium will be followed by a wine and canapés reception.
_______________________________________________________________________
Speakers:
Rita Segato is an Argentine anthropologist, with a Ph.D. from the Department of Social Anthropology, Queen's University Belfast, specializing in Social Anthropology and Ethnomusicology (1984). She is Emeritus Professor at the University of Brasilia, having taught in the Anthropology, Bioethics and Human Rights programs; senior Researcher at the Brazilian National Council for Scientific Research (CNPq); and Director of the Rita Segato Chair of Uncomfortable Thought at the National University of San Martín, Argentina. Her work has been translated into a number of languages, and she is the recipient of numerous academic awards. As a human rights activist she created and directed the project ‘Speak up, prisoner! The human right to speak in prison’ at the Brasilia penitentiary, which was later adapted to prisons in the province of Buenos Aires. She co-authored (in collaboration with José Jorge de Carvalho) the first proposal for affirmative action for the admission of black and indigenous students to Brazilian public higher education, and between 2003 and 2011, she accompanied the FUNAI workshops for indigenous women within all regions of Brazil on issues of human rights, gender and violence. She has appeared as an expert witness or judge in tribunals dealing with human rights, including the project ‘Preventing Gender Violence: Experiences and Lessons Learned in Latin America and the Caribbean’ for the United Nations Regional Spotlight Program.
Hortense J. Spillers is a teacher, scholar, literary critic, and writer, widely recognized as the most significant theorist in Black feminist and humanist inquiry. She has had a huge impact on U.S. and global feminist theory and Black studies. The Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor and distinguished research professor emerita at Vanderbilt University, she is the author of “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” one of the most cited essays in African American literary studies. Growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, Spillers was raised in the Black Baptist tradition of the American South, to become, as she would later describe it, “something of a child orator.” As a result, she fell in love with words and the power of their influence, which developed into an abiding interest in politics and law. Her doctoral dissertation laid the foundation for her subsequent scholarship on Black culture and the African diaspora by examining the poetic and narrative form, unifying function and cathartic nature of the Black sermon tradition. Spillers began her career at Wellesley College and has held faculty positions at Haverford College, Cornell University, Emory University and Vanderbilt University. She has taught courses in African and African American literature, Faulkner, and feminist theory. She is the author of Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (2003) and editor of Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (1985, with Marjorie Pryse) and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text (1991). Among numerous career awards, she has been honoured by the Caribbean Philosophical Association with its Nicolás Guillén Lifetime Achievement Award (2017), and with the Brandeis University Alumni Achievement Award (2019), which celebrated her as a “pioneering professor, feminist scholar and critic.”
(adapted from: https://yale2024.yale.edu/honorary-degrees/hortense-j-spillers)
Pascale Molinier is a French psychologist and professor of social psychology at Sorbonne Paris Nord University since 2009. Among other research and editorial roles, from 2014 to 2022, she was editor of the Cahiers du Genre. Her research interests include the psychodynamics of work, institutional psychotherapy, and forms of subjectivation and subjugation related to the gendered division of labour. With Patricia Paperman and Sandra Laugier, she is the author or editor of several books on ethics and care work. Her latest book is Care Work (2025), published in the Ethics of Care series by Peeters Publishers (Leuven, Belgium), in which she argues for a political transformation of work and society by placing care at the centre of the debate on work.
Ramsey McGlazer is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and Senior Editor of Critical Times. He is the author of Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (2020) and the translator of a number of books from Spanish, including, most recently, Rita Segato's The War Against Women (2025). He is working on a book about aesthetics and radical psychiatry, especially in Italy and Brazil, and his public writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Lux Magazine, n+1, and Parapraxis, among other places.
Raluca Soreanu is a psychoanalytic and psychosocial thinker and writer. She is Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK, and a psychoanalyst, member of the Círculo Psicanalítico do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, UK. Her book The Psychic Life of Fragments: On Splitting and the Experience of Time in Psychoanalysis will be published by Routledge in 2026. She is the author of Working-through Collective Wounds: Trauma, Denial, Recognition in the Brazilian Uprising (Palgrave, 2018) and the co-author, with Jenny Willner and Jakob Staberg, of Ferenczi Dialogues: On Trauma and Catastrophe (Leuven University Press, 2023). She is the project lead of the interdisciplinary research project FREEPSY: Free Clinics and a Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices, Implications for Our Times (UKRI Frontier Research Grant); Academic Associate of The Freud Museum London; and Editor of the Studies in the Psychosocial series at Palgrave and of the Important Little Books in Psychoanalysis Series at 1968 Press.
Lizaveta van Munsteren, PhD, is a psychodynamic psychotherapist (BPC) and academic with a research focus in psychoanalytic theory and history. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher with the FREEPSY project at the University of Essex, UK, working on theoretical formulations of the psychoanalytic frame in free clinics, and archives of free clinics in Vienna and Budapest. She is a lecturer in psychotherapy at King's College London, and teaches Freud at the Bowlby Centre.
Kristina Valendinova is a psychoanalyst based in London, member of CFAR in London and the Cercle Freudien in Paris. She is the co-founder of Bubble and Speak, a drop-in for young children and their families.
Tania Rivera is a psychoanalyst and essayist whose work spans multiple disciplines, moving between psychoanalysis, philosophy, and both artistic and literary theory and practice. Her research seeks to gather and unfold proposals for delineating the subject within culture at a micropolitical level, contributing to discussions on gender and the decolonization of thought. She holds a PhD in Psychology from the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium (1996), and is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Art at Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil. In 2016, she was a visiting professor in the Department of Plastic Arts at Université Paris 8 – Vincennes-Saint-Denis. Rivera received the Jabuti Prize in Psychology/Psychoanalysis (2014) for her book O Avesso do Imaginário: Arte Contemporânea e Psicanálise (The Reverse of the Imaginary: Contemporary Art and Psychoanalysis, Cosac Naify, 2013). Her most recent book, Lugares do Delírio – Arte e Expressão, Loucura e Política (Places of Delirium – Art and Expression, Madness and Politics; n-1 edições, 2023), continues this line of inquiry. She has also worked as a curator, notably of the exhibition Lugares do Delírio (Places of Delirium, Rio Art Museum, 2017; Sesc Pompeia, 2018), among others.
Maria Ribeiro is a social scientist (PUC-SP), with an MA (PUC-SP) and a PhD (PUC-SP/Université Paris-Diderot) in Communication and Semiotics. Professor in the Graduate Programme in Humanities, Rights and Other Legitimacies (PPGHDL/FFLCH) at the University of São Paulo (USP) and in the General Coordination for Specialisation, Professional Development and Extension (COGEAE) at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP). Rapporteur-General of the International Symposium on Birth Care (SIAPARTO), member of the Coletivo Psicanálise Periférica (Peripheral Psychoanalysis Collective), and author of the book Ginecológicas: nascimento negro para além da tragédia.
Diana Caine was Consultant Neuropsychologist at the National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery, London where she worked for a number of years as both neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst. She is currently a psychoanalyst in private practice. Her published research focused on disorders of autobiographical and semantic memory, and on psychotic-like phenomena in neurological patients, especially delusions of misidentification, drawing on psychoanalytic theory to re-think the implications of neurological damage for human subjectivity. More recently she has turned her interest in psychoanalysis and her critical attention to aspects of coloniality, particularly to the relation between settler colonial infants and the enslaved or indentured women who cared for them. An article on this subject appeared as ‘Apartheid’s paradox: Impossible borders, unspeakable intimacies’ in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2023), a version of which will be incorporated in a book, working title Mothering in the Colonies, to be published by Routledge in 2026.
Kwame Yonatan is a psychoanalyst, postdoctoral fellow from USP and PhD from PUC-SP. He works as a clinical and institutional supervisor. He is a professor at Instituto Gerar, Centro de Estudos Psicanalíticos, and Casa do Saber. Poet and writer, he has published four books: Transverso, Nasce um desejo, Feliz para sempre?, and Por um fio: uma escuta das diásporas pulsionais, which will soon have an English translation. He has professional experience in public policy. He is currently also a member of the Margens Clínicas collective and one of the organizers of the "Aquilombamento nas Margens" project. Capoeirista with the Angoleiros do Sertão group. Father of Kalihe Harumi and Dayô Maru.
_______________________________________________________________________
Tickets:
Solidarity Ticket - £25
Standard Ticket - £15
A limited number of £10 bursary tickets are available for those under financial hardship. Please email perry@freud.org.uk to apply for a bursary.
The purpose of this event is to raise funds for the Freud Museum London, which receives no regular Government income. We are grateful to you for supporting our independent museum as generously as possible.
The event will be held on the first floor of the Museum during regular opening hours. Unfortunately the Freud Museum does not have step-free access at this time. Advance booking is highly recommended as capacity is limited.
Good to know
Highlights
- 3 hours
- In person
Refund Policy
Location
Freud Museum London
20 Maresfield Gardens
London NW3 5SX
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