Wild Woman

The instinctual feminine psyche. In Estés, the wild-woman is “the quintessential two-million-year-old woman” (Estés 2017) — the archetypal ground from which the woman’s creative, erotic, and intuitive life arises. She is not the Jungian anima (which is the contrasexual soul-image in a man’s psyche) and not Neumann’s neumann-great-mother (which polarizes between devouring and life-giving faces). She is the woman’s own wilderness — “the wild nature” that “passed through my spirit twice, once by my birth to a passionate Mexican-Spanish bloodline, and later, through adoption by a family of fiery Hungarians” (Estés 2017).

The archetype is endangered in the same way the wildlands are endangered: “It’s not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild natures fades … wolves and coyotes, bears and wildish women have similar reputations. They all share related instinctual archetypes” (Estés 2017). The ecological and psychic losses are one loss.

The Wild Woman is recovered not through interpretation alone but through “deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayermaking, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness” (Estés 2017) — in short, through the range of practices the tradition has always named as the return to the imaginal ground.

Relationships

• anima
• neumann-great-mother
• rio-abajo-rio
• active-imagination
• instinct

Primary sources

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