Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

Estés's framework: the "Wild Woman" archetype lives within every woman as the instinctual, creative, knowing layer of the psyche — a layer that gets domesticated, exiled, or buried by socialization. Women Who Run with the Wolves is a 500-page reclamation of that archetype, told through myth.

A Jungian psychoanalyst and cantadora (keeper of old stories), Estés draws on intercultural myths, fairy tales, and folk tales — many from her own family — to build what she calls a "psychology of women in the truest sense." Each story serves as a doorway: the tale of Bluebeard for the wound of innocence, La Llorona for the price of disconnection from the soul, the Handless Maiden for descent and recovery. The book spent 145 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list — a record at the time — and won a Las Primeras Award for being the first Latina-authored book on that list. Not linear argument but spiraling commentary, returning to the same themes from different angles, in the way that myth itself works.

Details

• Author: Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD
• Publisher: Rider (Penguin Random House)
• Originally published: 1992
• Pages: 560

About the Author

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Jungian psychoanalyst, cantadora (keeper of old stories in the Latin American oral tradition), poet, and post-trauma specialist. Estés grew up in the Great Lakes region as the adopted daughter of an immigrant family from Hungary and Mexico, learning storytelling at the knees of her aunts. She holds a PhD in ethno-clinical psychology and has worked for decades with survivors of war, torture, and disaster. Her other works include The Faithful Gardener, The Gift of Story, Untie the Strong Woman, and the spoken-word collection Seeing in the Dark.