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Talking with you on this occasion is a privilege based on my “retired” status as APsaA's immediate past president. That person is traditionally invited, six months later, to speak on a theme that is both personally meaningful and significant to psychoanalysis.1
When I conceived my topic for this plenary, “Female Leadership: Difficulties and Gifts,” I had in mind my experience as APsaA president and how my being a woman contributed to that experience. My thinking has evolved in the interim. My interest has become “The Feminine in Leadership,” and I will focus on that too in my remarks.
I hope to take you on my relatively recent journey without sacrificing my original goal: to inspire more women within APsaA to pursue leadership roles. The significant turn in my thinking has been in the direction of the feminine as a set of capacities that are not tied to biological sex and are critically important to both women and men who wish to become effective leaders in democratic, collaborative, forward-looking organizations.
There tends to be a conflation of female and feminine that does not serve us well. I will focus on the differences between female and feminine in relation to leadership using the lens suggested by Muriel Dimen (1997). She wrote about the fundamental interrelationship of psychoanalytic, feminist, and social theory. This triangular lens permits a disentanglement of terms and a move away from old categories that restrict us, including conflation of the female with the feminine.