ABSTRACT
In Chapter 12, Frances Arnold highlights the importance of viewing leadership, including leadership identity and authority, as emerging through social processes that are part of the larger frame of power. Drawing from Muriel Dimen, she notes the long divide in psychoanalysis between those who argue that our field should confine itself to the individual psyche, and others who suggest it is impossible to understand individual subjectivity without recognition of discourse as a power structure that influences development and delineates how and what we think. With this frame in mind, Arnold explores the contribution of several iconic female leaders, beginning with Hillary Rodham Clinton and Wonder Woman, the famous super heroine. She also considers the lives and contributions of three female psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, Carol Nadelson, Carola Eisenberg and Margaret Morgan Lawrence, who are pioneers in the field of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Arnold considers their rise to leadership, suggesting that, for each, it is a mosaic that includes unpredictable social forces and opportunities. Finally, Arnold explores how psychoanalytic ideas about power, gender and misogyny might help us to understand the complex reactions evoked by powerful women.
