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Cover of Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Women Who Run with the Wolves

  • 561 pages · about 9 hours
  • First published 1982
  • 42 editions

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1 About this book

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 ruins 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.

  • Archetype (Psychology)
  • Psychology
  • Personal growth
  • Women, psychology
  • Fairy tales
  • Folklore
  • Women
  • Feminism

2 What to expect

A long book of Jungian psychology built on myths and folk tales, each retold and then interpreted as a lesson about women's instinctive nature. Estés, an analyst and storyteller, argues that women have been cut off from a wild, creative self and that old stories show the way back to it. The style is poetic, repetitive and intense, more meditation than argument, and it is slow reading, best taken a story at a time.

Good for readers who want: myths and fairy tales, women's psychology, and a poetic read.

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