Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful
force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless
knowing. Her name is Wild Woman, but she is an endangered species.
Though the gifts of wildish nature come to us at birth, society's
attempt to "civilize" us into rigid roles has plundered this treasure,
and muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls. Without
Wild Woman, we become over-domesticated, fearful, uncreative, trapped.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., Jungian analyst and cantadora
storyteller, shows how woman's vitality can be restored through what she
calls "psychic archeological digs" into the bins of the female
unconscious. In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Estes uses
multicultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories chosen from
over twenty years of research that help women reconnect with the
healthy, instinctual, visionary attributes of the Wild Woman archetype.
Dr. Estes collects the bones of many stories, looking for the archetypal
motifs that set a woman's inner life into motion. "La Loba" teaches
about the transformative function of the psyche. In "Bluebeard," we
learn what to do with wounds that will not heal; in "Skeleton Woman," we
glimpse the mystical power of relationship and how dead feelings can be
revived; "Vasalisa the Wise" brings our lost womanly instincts to the
surface again; "The Handless Maiden" recovers the Wild Woman initiation
rites; and "The Little Match Girl" warns against the insidious dangers
of a life spent in fantasy. In these and other stories, we focus on the
many qualities of Wild Woman. We retrieve, examine, love, and understand
her, and hold her against our deep psyches as one whois both magic and
medicine. In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Estes has created a new
lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and lifegiving, it is
a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.
