Natural Predator of the Psyche

The internal figure, named by Estés in her reading of “Bluebeard,” that attacks the woman’s original creative and instinctual nature. “There is a natural predator in the psyche, one who says, ‘Die!’ and ‘Bah!’ and ‘Why don’t you give up?’ on a rather automatic basis” (Estés 2017). Family and culture can exacerbate this predator, but the figure itself is archetypal — a feminine-inflected reading of what Jung named as the shadow when it turns destructive.

The predator’s work is visible in the cellar: “That is why the women lie as skeletons and cadavers in Bluebeard’s cellar. They learnt of the trap, but too late. Consciousness is the way out of the box, the way out of the torture” (Estés 2017). The archetypal diagnosis is that women who repeatedly kill off their “entirely original, creative, soulful, and wildish natures in response to threats from the predator” are not personally pathological — they are caught in an archetypal pattern the tale has already mapped.

The rescue, in the tale, comes through the healthy animus — “the brothers in ‘Bluebeard,’ it loves the woman it inhabits” (Estés 2017). The inner masculine that bears aggression for the soul rather than against it is the counter-force to the predator.

Relationships

• shadow
• animus
• wild-woman

Primary sources

• estes-women-who-run-with-wolves (Estés 1992)