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Conferences have a trajectory of their own. Encompassing unconscious as well as conscious expectations, conferences tend to feel unsatisfying unless, by the end of the day, some common or personal resolution is reached that carries the momentum
further. Looking around this hall I find myself wondering about the almost palpable atmosphere of high anticipation. What has brought 400 people together today? Which internal chords have resonated to the Freud Museum call and how has a distant storm in women's self-awareness contributed to this ground-swell 20 years on?
Like most audiences we have come here today to listen, learn, share our ideas. Hopefully people will feel free to speak openly despite the large numbers. Yet, on reflection, it seems to me that we have also gathered here with another purpose - not only to remember the past, nor even to take stock of the many material and conceptual changes that have occurred over the two decades since the ground-breaking publication of Psychoanalysis and Feminism. We have come to celebrate our achievements but in addition, in the spirit of both the women's movement and psychoanalytic itself, I believe we may have also chosen to come back 20 years after that formative period to re-evaluate ourselves from within. For this reason, I shall introduce a personal note and speak here of events in my life I have not until now voiced in public.
If in many ways, and to each in our own way, today might be regarded as a day of reckoning one of the main questions we must ask is - what in our own subjective psychohistories has brought each of us to seek that intricate combination of psychoanalysis and feminism in our lives, and how, in our daily lives, can we utilize the one to extend our understanding of the other? Speaking for myself, I feel a great many aspects o